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thomhartmann

(3,978 posts)
Mon May 21, 2012, 12:49 PM May 2012

Thom Hartmann: The Psychopaths Killed Another American



The Psychopaths killed another American this month. Dave Johnson over at AlterNet is telling the story of Norman Rousseau and his wife - two people who did everything they were supposed to do. They were responsible homeowners who did business with Wells Fargo and put a 30% down payment on this home in California back in 2000, and they made every payment from then on - never missing even one single-month. At that same time, the housing bubble frenzy took off. Banks discovered they could make enormous profits dragging homeowners away from safe fixed-rate mortgages and into exploding adjustable rate mortgages. For the bank, it didn’t matter if the interest rate on the new loan would skyrocket and eventually lead to a foreclosure. The bank got their money no matter what, either through missed payment fees, late-payment fees, refinancing fees, and then after foreclosure through government support, tax write-offs, and the underlying value of the property.


As a corporation, a bank Wells Fargo only has one obligation: increase profits for its shareholders - that’s it. To hell with their customers, their community, their nation. Just as long as they’re hitting that bottom-line goal, then Wells Fargo is doing exactly what it’s legally obligated to do. If Wells Fargo was a person, and didn’t give a damn about their fellow man and was willing to do whatever it takes - lie, cheat, steal, kill - for profit, then we’d call that person a psychopath. If a psychopath had defrauded a person, and then harassed her to the point of committing suicide to get it to stop, we'd lock that psychopath up and keep him away from society. But as a corporation, we give companies like Wells Fargo tax breaks and bailouts, and turn the other way when they drive their customers to suicide. So, in 2007, Wells Fargo's salesmen decided to prey on one of their customers - Norman Rousseau.

According to court documents, the bank approached the Rousseau’s about changing their mortgage to an adjustable rate mortgage. The Rousseau’s stressed they were only interested in a fixed-rate loan and they wanted to pay the same payments through the life of the loan. But they trusted the bank - which was a big mistake. So when Wells Fargo told them that the “new industry standard” is adjustable rate mortgages, and they could save more than $600 a month in mortgage payments, and that the “worst-case scenario” would be an increase of only a few dollars on their monthly payments, the Rousseau’s gave in to the salesmen and took the new mortgage. But a few years later, in 2009, the Rousseau’s knew they were stuck with a bad dealTheir new interest rate was higher than it was before 2007, and even higher than what they were told it could increase to. But as responsible homeowners who had done everything they were supposed to do, the Rousseau’s still made each and every monthly payment on time.

That’s when Wells Fargo - behaving like a true psychopath - moved in for the kill. In May of that year, the bank claimed the Rousseau’s missed a monthly payment. The Rousseaus said that was impossible, that they had made the payment, and even gave proof that they made the payment at the bank with a cashier’s check and that check had been cashed by the bank. But the bank still claimed it never received the payment, and a few months later said the Rousseau's again missed another payment in June and another in July, even though Norman Rousseau had, again, hand-delivered a cashier’s check to the bank to pay each of those months. Finally, the bank recognized its error and in August told the Rousseaus that they were indeed current on all their payments. But a few months later, Wells Fargo went back to the same scheme - again claiming a missed payment and then hitting the Rosseau's with fee after fee, penalty after penalty.

Over the next few years, this sort of back-and-forth, double-talk, Kafkaesque nightmare continued between Wells Fargo and Norman Rousseau. The fees kept piling up, as did the lies from the bank - and then the eviction notices came rolling in. By 2012, the financial burden of the whole ordeal became unbearable, and the Rousseau’s - like so many other Americans in the middle of the housing meltdown - were getting wiped out by the increased mortgage payments. That’s when Wells Fargo finished them off, setting the eviction date of May 15th for when Norman Rousseau and his wife had to be out of their house. The Rousseau's considered moving into the RV in front of their home. But that plan didn't work out either. Two days before the scheduled eviction, Norman Rousseau, apparently unable to bear losing his home after the bank had already taken all his money, pulled out a gun and killed himself - leaving behind a devastated wife:

For the news and Wells Fargo, it was just another casualty of our economy, now under the control of corporate psychopaths. So how many more lives have to be ruined before our nation wakes up to the fact that everything that makes life worth living in America is being stolen by psychopathic executives sitting on the boards and steering the wheels of the nation’s biggest corporations? Our economy today is rooted in this form of corporate capitalism, which relies on an insatiable drive for more and more profits. It relies on blind greed. You see it not just in homeowners being pushed off the ledge - but in entire cities that are poisoned by corporate chemical and energy plants that spew their pollution downstream. You see it in for-profit health insurance companies that use ACTUAL death panels to deny women and children life-saving medical procedures to keep up their quarterly profits.You see it in defense companies that lobby Congress for more war just so they can sell more and more tanks, warplanes, and bombs - regardless of how many deaths it'll mean.

Do these corporations EVER show any remorse for the damage they cause? Did Wells Fargo think twice about how they'd handle their next foreclosure victim after Norman Rousseau blew his head off? As far as we can tell, the answer is "No." At least not as long as the profits keep rolling in. This is genuinely psychopathic behavior. Norman Rousseau put a gun to himself this month, but he didn’t pull the trigger - Corporate psychopaths did. And any one of us could be the next Norman Rousseau, as long as our nation continues this embrace of free-market psychopathic corporate capitalism. It’s time to look for something new. It's time to build a new economy that puts shareholder profits BEHIND the well-being of customers, workers, and communities.

Right now, the best alternative out there is the worker co-operative model - businesses owned by the workers, where profits are shared, and decisions are democratized. Over a billion people around the world do business with a co-operative. And here in the United States, there are 11,000 worker-owned cooperatives employing more Americans than are members of the entire private-sector labor movement. You can see the success of the co-operatives in places like Madison, Wisconsin where everything from cab companies to manufacturing plants to even strip clubs are organized as worker-owned co-ops and are achieving great success...without psychopathic violence. It's simple, we can build a new economy that works for all of us - and depends on cooperation rather than predation.


Or we can stick to what we have now, and let the free market corporate psychopaths continue to run roughshod over this nation. The time to choose is now.


The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 9pm and 11pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings
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Thom Hartmann: The Psychopaths Killed Another American (Original Post) thomhartmann May 2012 OP
Bingo! Corporations are psychopathic legal entities ProfessionalLeftist May 2012 #1
Psychopathic vampires they are. This is horrid. 99th_Monkey May 2012 #2
Thom, I agree with your premise..... DeSwiss May 2012 #3
Thanks for the input there. freshwest May 2012 #5
+1,000 and thanksvery much for the full description. freshwest May 2012 #4

ProfessionalLeftist

(4,982 posts)
1. Bingo! Corporations are psychopathic legal entities
Mon May 21, 2012, 02:27 PM
May 2012

which exist for one reason: profit making at any cost. If they were "human" or "people", they could be nothing but psychopaths.

 

99th_Monkey

(19,326 posts)
2. Psychopathic vampires they are. This is horrid.
Mon May 21, 2012, 04:01 PM
May 2012

and needs to become an Oscar-winning expose..

Hello Hollywood? Indie?

ON EDIT: I absolutely LOVE Thom's bringing up worker-owned
cooperatives as "the way to go" into a better future. I did my
post-graduate work on just that topic, showing how co-ops are
more stable for workers, and also plow 100% of the capital
profits right back into the LOCAL economy. I did this all
back in the late 1980's. If only everyone had listened then.

 

DeSwiss

(27,137 posts)
3. Thom, I agree with your premise.....
Mon May 21, 2012, 04:08 PM
May 2012

...and have personally been involved in the creation, management and operation of housing cooperatives for the past 23 years. But until and unless this rotten government is excised, there will be no solution safe from these sick bastards. They own the government and the politicians.

- It would like putting new wine in old wine-skins........

K&R

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