Finance CEOs made their own beds

During this whole federal bail out of investment companies, there have been a lot of 'analysts' on cable news programs arguing that no one in the industry saw this coming.

I call bullsh**t.

Before Justin.tv, before I went to college, I was a work-a-holic employee at Wells Fargo Home Equity for almost five years. I had started with the company as a temp in the fax department right out of high school, and at that time (in July '02), my supervisor would say "this housing market is going to collapse, don't get too comfortable". Years went by, with apprehension in the air as anyone with at least a double digit IQ who worked in home finance WAITED for the housing market to fall apart. Each interest rate increase inevitably brought up the question: is this the end? The job I held for two years, before I left the company, required knowing federal regulations on property assessment for loan applications in order to maintain a low level of risk. Basically, I ordered and reviewed property value and ownership based on the company's credit policy and the law. This gave me not acute insight into the federal regulations for loans, but also what other banks were doing in order to process their own mortgages/home equity loans in the most profitable way.

I hear on the news things like, "no one saw this coming" or "you can't hold these people accountable for fluctuations in the economy". During my appraisal/title ordering work, I would get to argue with customers and their bankers who felt that the valuation of their property was insufficient, or even that their property shouldn't have to be inspected at all. They would send in appraisals from previous mortgages or home equity applications with other banks (ie, WaMu, First National, etc) with absolutely brainless valuations. Comparable values from completely different cities, sometimes even different states, no on site inspections, significant property damage that we discovered wouldn't even be mentioned within these appraisals, as well as just plain inaccurate recording of square footage and amenities. In most cases, these were appraisals that were required for legal compliance, and they were trash. Towards the end, I had to be a part of firing several appraisers for not abiding by legal standards. They argued that all the other lending institutions didn't care about the regulations, why should we?

Customers would rant and rave about their neighbor's house getting a high valuation through a different bank, and loan processors within the center would sometimes let these sentiments get to them. If our regulations weren't so strict, we would have even more business (therefore more overtime hours and more bonuses). Some of these employees left to go work for commission at these other banks, and many times they would return with horror stories of mandatory 80 hour work weeks, a severe lack of ethical consideration in underwriting, and pure lawlessness in their procedures. The feds would inspect other banks just as they did ours, but what they searched for was always surface level. Rarely did anyone dig too deep.

I left Wells Fargo to attend U of A in Tucson and got a part time job in a different mortgage company. This newer company (which shall remain unnamed) was the unethical side of the coin I had always heard about, but never witnessed. My job was essentially to file deeds/titlework/appraisals for loans bought from other lending institutions. Some of these were horrifically illegal, and this company I worked for had actually paid money to acquire the risk in them! I couldn't believe the shuffling some of these loans were going through; four or five mortgage servicing turn overs within five years. This company seemed to aggressively purchase whatever they could get their hands on, and sell them with no apparent rational behind the decision. What they seemed to hold on to, the cream of the crop per say, were loans for customers with a history of credit problems. Why? Late fees and adjustable interest rates. New employees at this company would, in their severe ignorance, ask why anyone would want loans from customers with low credit scores. Most would eventually grow to trust their CEOs, "they must know what they are doing", but I never did.

When I brought up this concern to a supervisor, I was promoted out of the department a week later, away from the junk loans. I didn't stay with that company very long. By this point the housing bubble was starting to fall apart, and that ship was going down fast.

My point is simply this; everyone from mail room workers to CEOs saw this coming. Everyone knew the law, and the only company I personally knew of that followed the law is now seeing rising stock prices amid federal buyout plans and acquisitions. I don't think anyone is surprised by this; everyone in investment/finance knew exactly what they were doing, and what they were doing was taking advantage of massive deregulation. More than once, I noticed that Wells stuck with policies even after the legal requirements necessitating them were overturned. The amount of risks these banks and investment companies were taking on these junk loans was absolutely outrageous, and these CEOs made massive profits off of them. Sure, buy them out, but these CEOs sunk their battleships. They should have to live with that.

Why not walking was sort of a cake-walk for me.

Over and over viewers on JTV, online friends, or anyone who didn't know my past asked why I wasn't more upset about not being able to walk, or being this ill in general. There are so many events in my life that I carry around silently, hinting at them but never fully explaining them. Jacob may be the first person in my life to know the full scope of everything that has been done to me, as well as things I have done to myself. A few people received hints at this one, but I never really let on the whole story. This is something I tried to publish, but it got rejected for being too outrageous (the story of my life). Everything in here is true to my perspective, and I'm tired of being quiet about it for fear of damaging reputations, or hurting the feelings of people who never cared for mine.


The words hummed around me, shoulder squeezes and sympathetic looks served as maneuvers to infiltrate my cocoon. Their gasoline apologies only strengthened my inflamed loneliness and humiliation. My form I made immobile, hoping to become nothing but a statue on the sofa of this alien household. The perfect straight lines of picture frames and the sheath of fragile glass sheltered the happy family photographs from my anger. I hated them for those smiles, and they smiled at me in reply.

"Come on, lets get you cleaned up."

I heard the words, and inwardly laughed at the suggestion. My hands came into focus. What soaps, brushes, or scrubs did they keep here that could wash away battered skin and bones? Would bleach remove bruises? The memories of what had just transpired had been grafted into my soul. The only thing that could be washed away is a family, and only with a mixture of alcohol and words.

Suddenly I was elevated, two hands grasped me by my arms and I was guided down a dark hall. I wondered as I walked on if this was my death. Perhaps this painful concoction of blue carpeting, eggshell white paint, and Precious Moments dolls was the infamous tunnel to my demise.

From the looks of things, I'm going to interior design hell.

The bathroom door swung open, the light brutally assailed my eyes and in my hand a washcloth appeared. My friend had brushed my hair out of my face and said something soothing that I don't recall. I just wondered where my parachute had gone, and why I hadn't died like I expected.

My friend left, and the door closed me into my solitude. I turned towards the mirror with indifference. The girl in the glass looked like a badly painted porcelain doll. Face red and swollen from sobbing, hair in disarray, shirt with spots of blood. The thin girl touched her scalp carefully as I watched, and winced. It was then I saw her neck, the infantile state of bruising encircled her pale white throat. You could already tell they were marks from fingers; why would she allow herself to be seen in such a state?

I breathed deeply, but instead of inhaling, pain shot through my torso. The end of my shirt I lifted precariously to reveal battered ribs. The image in the mirror sobbing quietly with me, and I appreciated her companionship in misery.

When I had calmed down, I found myself perched on a scale on the bathroom floor, holding my arms tightly to my chest like I did as a child. To my side, the shower door reflected this adult version of the kid I was. Another mirror. Three mirrors in one bathroom. I scoffed at the vanity of it. My imaginative mind attempted to salvage meaning from it, but Clarity had decided instead to bring me back to recollection.

I knew there was going to be trouble this morning. The atmosphere was tense, as though the pilot light had been left on in a pyromaniac's home. I heard my dad pouring himself wine in the family room. From the solid thud of the bottle being set down, I realized someone had bought a full box of matches. I cleaned everything and avoided where he sat at all costs. My little brother and sister I herded into the next room.

It will be me if anyone this time, not them.

Hours passed tensely, afternoon turned to dusk. The passage of time lowered my guard. Now the two youngest children sat a room away from him. I forgot the danger, and instead smiled with pride as I watched them play chess. A six year old and a ten year old playing a game most adults couldn't appreciate. It was a cheap set bought for my father that had been handed down to the children. The phone rang, and as any typical teenage girl I ran to answer it. After several minutes of conversation with my boyfriend, I was jarred back to reality. From the next room I heard a match strike, then the hiss of ignition.

"What did you fucking kids do with my chess piece?"

I knew there was going to be trouble this morning. Every two weeks something set him off. I came around the corner, and peered into the room I had left the children in. They hid, as of yet undiscovered, behind the couch as my father yelled furiously over a missing piece of plastic. The world was in slow motion. My mind was besieged with memories. The broken nose I earned when I was 12 for reading a kids book. My then 2 year old brother lifted by his leg and thrown across the room for crying. I recalled praying silently, my pregnant mother begging for mercy as he held a knife to her throat against my bedroom door. I wondered if my baby sister could remember that, the first time her father almost killed her.

Mother always worked, father never interested, oldest daughter left to raise the younger children. Its a frequent situation. The women's movement only applies in special cases, I had conjectured. Though I was just a teenager, only a child myself, those two frightened children were mine. I loved them, I knew their failures and fears, their skills and sentiments. I had always there for them, because they were all I had.

But at this moment, fear had made me a frozen observer. I couldn't intervene. Countless times I had watched as my older brother looked on when our dad came after me. Fear and mild hints of remorse I read in their faces as the old man's fists took flight. Now I understood their predicament as I stood there in my shameful trance, self preservation advertising my cowardice. My eyes slid from father to hidden children in slow motion. My little brother clasped his hand on our sister's mouth too late to prevent a whimper's escape.

(Oh god, he's going to kill them.

Awakened suddenly, I could not pitifully tremble from uselessness any longer. I shouted, I swore, and I waved for them to run to me. As though avoiding a blood thirty giant, they skirted around his feet and hid behind me.

"Into my room, don't lock the door!" I whispered as I pushed them on, and turned back to my father. Before long it was time for me to run too, down the one way hall to my locked bedroom door. Locked.

I knew there was going to be trouble this morning; a massive understatement.

In slow motion I turned to face him. I sobbed in terror and blabbered an excuse, no nobility left in my appearance. The tattered shouts and cries from behind the door were muffled as my father bashed my head against it, his hands around my throat, squeezing the life from my veins. It was all too easy for him. Enraged with alcohol or not, his two hundred pound frame stood six inches taller than me. I've always been the smallest in my family. Teachers at school tended to ask if I was adopted.

The ice cold tile struck my face hard. I wondered how the tile got on my door, or if he had tiles in his hands. I began to fade into unconsciousness as I realized I had fallen to the ground. Something mysteriously hit me in the stomach, chest, neck over and over. With weary eyes I saw his foot collide with my face in slow motion.

He's kicking me when I'm down. That is so cheap.

As I was lulled into blackness, I realized my mother had been yelling. I had barely noticed she was there.

"Jesus, you are killing her! God, please stop! You are killing her!"

I laughed at my mother's words within my agony. This man is no god.

Little hands were dragging me backward along the ground, into my bedroom. Arms and hands I had forgotten I had pulled me inside and closed the door. Though my consciousness had slipped, my panic and tolerance had not. Frantic phone calls to whoever would answer, confused looks from my siblings, and declarations of independence ensued. Then a growl came at the door from an unexpected monster.

"Open the door, Norah. NOW."

Mom? I saved the kids, didn't you see?

I opened the door, and raced back to my bed, holding the two terrified children in my arms tightly. Brutally, with finality, she took them away. My body shivered from the cold vacancy. The emptiness was my only comfort as I faced her anger. The confused synapses and neural connections in my recently battered brain could not process what was happening. An obvious line divided this situation from tolerable, but my Mom was the perfect voice of reason. What logical reasoning had I failed to identify?

"Mom, I'm not going to take this." I declared in a voice too small to express my determination.

While I was a child, my family moved so frequently, so hastily, that friendships were hard to justify. The importance of family was a lesson told over and over by my perfect mother, a lesson she never had to teach to me. All of my favorite memories were of her, or of my brothers and sisters. I never cared if society scorned me; my family was my world. It was us against the man, the man who was now pouring himself another glass of wine in the kitchen. With her high paying job, masters degree, blonde hair and blue eyes, she was a six foot tall Nordic goddess to me. All seven children had blue eyes, all were tall, except for one. My swollen face and reddened eyes accentuated our disconnect with my impure green eyes.

I always knew I didn't belong.

"Norah, you have to accept that this is the way it is. Nothing is going to change."

The destruction of my admiration of her was not a slow process, but rather it was a severing as quick as a flick of her tongue. I staggered back from the release, watching the parachute that was my family travel forever away from me. With that killing blow dealt, she closed the door.

I recalled all the feminist style lectures, the rants about equal pay for equal work, the preparation she gave me for a world that would discriminate against me because I was born a woman. One day, I would understand that those words were not intended to be a description of her pathway through life, but rather a warning to avoid her result. At the time though, I only cared that I was a child, and had been betrayed by my mother.

A boyfriend too scared to get me, brothers too far away to call, the police always out of the question to my trained little mind.

Mom says rapists adopt children. Think of the children, Norah, think of the children.

A vague friendship is recalled, and without question or hesitation she comes. I wait at the window, still hyperventilating as I wait. I wait for a sign of her arrival, the sight of her car, as I wait for salvation from this insanity. Time drags for an eternity, and all I can think of is escape. Attachment, admiration, affection for my mother is pushed from my mind like a splinter.

Mother values her marriage vows above her children's lives. God would be proud.

The red Mazda comes around the corner, and I walk quickly out of the house, internally celebrating in the belief I had escaped notice. Anger repelled me from here, and I would now be homeless, sleeping on couches and even outside till I graduated, given hand outs of cash from school counselors and teachers, for a time, even a welcome dependent on my boyfriends mother, but I would recover. I thought of the future and I applauded my escape until I saw him. My father outside, walking towards me from the driveway.

"If he comes here again, I'll kill him."

Confusion twisted my face, but instinct nodded my head as I ran. He must have thought it was my boyfriend, I pondered. The one too terrified to save me.

Sorry to contradict you, dad, but mom isn't the only person who abandoned me today.

Into the car I went, and we drove till I had left my childhood far behind. Seven years later I still cannot be touched on the neck without it inducing terror. Visions and recollections are ushered into the forefront of my consciousness continually. These problems have evolved into mere companions now, compliments to my already bizarre set of idiosyncrasies. The tears over my mother's words dried up over time, though my soul bears the open wound from them for eternity. She and I are still friends, though throughout this illness, I have wondered if her lack of desire to visit me was some form of punishment. She is a great woman, who raised 4 children on a $23k/year salary while my father was out of work. I don't think I am capable of forgiveness, but if I am, I forgave her for what happened long ago. She is human, and made mistakes, just as I have made mine.

Her marriage to my father remains intact, though my relationship with him does not. His last words to me shall always be that misdirected death threat. Old age has calmed him, my mother says, though from time to time I receive reports to the contrary. I don't hate him anymore, but I consider myself to have no connection to him.

The people who helped me, especially the girl whom I was friends with up until my illness, I will be forever grateful for. One day I hope to send an "Ed McMahon" style check to them. Hopefully Justin.tv sells for a gazillion dollars and Jacob and I will have some money spend on giant checks :)

The ache that pains me to tears in my solitude, even to this day, is the time lost with my brother and sister. Birthdays, holidays, and achievements have all been experienced after the festivities are over, and almost always by phone. Fears, disasters, and heartbreaks have been left for others to attend to.

The children do not understand why I left them. The subsequent abandonment is the only event they recall vividly. The little sister, the child that called me mommy for years, is now a teenager. The little brother, who's glasses I would wipe tears from during sad movies, is now the age I was when I left him. His childhood has evolved into one much more different than I had experienced. Instead of his siblings, he turns to friends for advice and support. Suspicions of drinking and drug use now linger in the air between us as I try to recall the sweet, painfully gullible baby brother I once knew. The small children my mother pulled from my arms are gone now, replaced with young adults I will never really know.

I float on in the world, watching the parachute that was my family drift elsewhere, hoping I will find someone who will welcome me home.

Another 9/11 anniversary, another year of being punked.

I've never published anything about 9/11 before. Even as I write this, I feel disgusting even attempting to describe the enormity of it. I am from Brooklyn, NY. My parents were both born and spent almost all of their lives in NYC. At the time the towers fell, I was a homeless high school student staying with a New Yorker friend. She was already awake, doing her hair and makeup when she rushed into the room.

"Some asshole flew his Cessna into the World Trade Center" she said as she flicked on the television. I had been sleeping in, wallowing in self pity and nursing a heart broken by my parents. My friend was in the bathroom, listening to Howard Stern. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the footage on CNN and hoping the fire was as contained as they hinted it was.

Then, the second plane hit.

I shiver even now, only affected by the echos of memories from nearly a decade ago. Appeals to God could be heard in the newsroom on the television, but I didn't notice. The two of us screamed and cried, rushing from room to room, every television in the house showing different news channels. I called my mother, who was frantically trying to contact my brother, family friends, relatives, everyone and anyone we cared for. Those buildings were a hub for activity, and anyone in New York who we loved we could see having business in that complex. We didn't learn they were all okay until two days later. In one case, it was only being stuck in traffic that spared one of them from being injured, if not worse.

I prayed anxiously and eagerly, attempting to bargain on behalf of those people with a God I wasn't sure existed. The towers fell, and my childhood died. I hated myself for being so far away from the city I loved, helpless and lost in a state that would never understand. During my first class, I nearly got into a fist fight with a kid who said "Its just New York, it doesn't matter." Later, my math teacher shut off the television and said "The most important thing is that we learn math, so we can be better prepared to be competitive in the world. I'm not going to change my class schedule for something that happened on the other side of the country." I never returned to that class.

The attack on the pentagon, the hijacked plane brought down by the passengers in Pennsylvania, the anthrax attacks, it was all so much. Reports from my brother of people cheering in the streets of New York as the towers burned (not just in distant Pakistan), Muslims being dragged from their homes and executed in the streets, and then being told to go shopping by the President. Knowing that not only were these hijackers granted entry into our country, but they were trained to fly in the very state I lived it. To hear their extensions for legal habitation in our country were delivered to their residences weeks after they had killed thousands of our citizens infuriated me. It was surreal, but not as surreal as where we are now.

The simple fact is, the current administration let the people who did this to get away with it. We got sucker punched, and let them walk away. The politicians used our pain and anguish to wage a war they had already been planning before the attack. We were manipulated, and I went along with it during the next election, always hoping they would straighten things out. Faith in general, especially faith in other people, has never been my strong suit, but I tried. I didn't want to let down those firefighters who went rushing into those burning buildings to save others. I wanted to believe Bush would come through for us, for the sake of those who I was unable to help.

After Giuliani's run for President, where everything he said was "a noun, verb and 9/11", the RNC's graphic "tribute" video, and the polls that show people actually bought this bullshit causes me to consider leaving the country I love.

Over and over again, my brothers and I talk about how if given a time machine, we would book a ticket on one of those flights and murder those hijackers. Without regret, without remorse, without hesitation. But I wonder, how many others would do the same?