from CNN, not the PD

Foreclosure impact: Next stop, tax drop - Nov. 29, 2007 -- It's amazing how the other media continue to write the story about Cleveland, and the PLAIN DEALER still refuses to deal timely. Are they still afraid of offending advertising clients, as showcased in the recent Latourette dustup with the bloggers?

The one thing we all need to remember as we get down to true valuations in the NEO region is that all these properties just sitting and being ruined by the lenders' inattention sit adjacent to much of the world's fresh water supply. We need to take them back so that still more of our heritage assets are not wasted by those who just finished their unregulated feeding frenzy. Maybe it's even time to turn the tables.

Crain's gives heads up on local foreclosure mills

Crain's Cleveland Business: Run of the mill--Crain's Scott Suttell gives a heads up on local foreclosure mills in the national limelight as a result of clumsy--you might even be tempted to say "clunky"--overachievement in foreclosure speedup. This is one of the first ones where the nellies out on Chagrin haven't had their name mentioned. I wonder if they got a PR firm to do damage control?

WORTH Magazine: getting more useful each month

First Person Worth--WORTH Magazine grows more meaningful, for me, by the month; the editors are beginning to broaden the focus to include all of society and the impact proper deployment of wealth can have on the common good. Christy Mack's profile in an issue earlier this fall gives some insights into what giving really means, a lot along the lines of what we are hearing from Steven Post and Jack Ricchiuto. Her particular focus is integrative medicine. Read the whole thing, she has some good insights, one of which is--

For me, philanthropy is not about giving back. It is about sharing a part of who you are, whether it is your wealth or your wisdom, experience, knowledge, talent, skill or something as simple as a smile.

the pendulum now begins to swing back

Borrowers in trouble get break as judge cracks down - Cleveland's Top Story from The Plain Dealer -- more good news for our communities, as the pendulum swings back in a long overdue correction of abuses.

Callahan’s Cleveland Diary: Judge O' Malley in the mix, too

Callahan’s Cleveland Diary » Blog Archive » Federal judges toss foreclosures, say “Prove you own the mortgage” -- Bill Callahan gives us the story of Judge Kathleen O'Malley, who, along with Judge Christopher Boyko, is making history here in NEO.

Further down in the post, note Callahan's mention of the Mortgage Servicing Fraud blog. Things are coming around fast. Be ready to react sensibly to save your community. Look to yourselves for the solutions, first of all. You don't have to look to others for help.

NEO steps up, stands up, on foreclosure abuses

Foreclosures Hit a Snag for Lenders - New York Times -- Peter N. DeWolfe (of Grimm FT, LLC--sure beats the old "anonymous" tags) over at RealNEO got this into my consciousness early this morning.

This is huge news, now that Boyko has entered the fray. We stand to make history here in Northeast Ohio, first with Jim Rokakis standing up, now with Chris Boyko jamming the cogs of the machine. The tide is turning. We can all benefit. Stay closely attuned, pay attention. Reporters from NYC, Washington, Great Britain, and France have been covering this way better than our local PD.

The eye of the foreclosure maelstrom may in fact be right here--we host many of the causes, and many of the solutions. Because we host so many of the causative factors--the perps--we may get no press coverage that is critical of them. Think about it. Connect the dots. Use the Cleveland+ technique, as in things like Latourette+DC lobbyist wife+GCP+Clinic+PD advertising = Blogging Jeff and Blogging Jill on the street, or Bruce Akers+Keybank+GCP+local Republican party = the current sad state of affairs.

Having fun yet? I am. It's not so much a blame game as it is a realistic assessment of linkages, and cause and effect, the stuff Valdis Krebs charts. You can use big charts, or, for mini-drills, just use the Cleveland+ technique, a sort of shorthand to insight and understanding. I like the campaign more and more. It was inspired, perhaps even more than the perps realized.

and I never got to argue with him sober. . .

Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84 - New York Times -- One of my best imaginary friends died over the weekend. Mailer and I hadn't actually spoken since the fall of 1968. I was just out of college and dangling between going to Canada, wearing a dress, commissioning obscene tattoos, and succumbing to the draft. Just to set the record straight, I got tired of the suspense and enlisted just before Woodstock, and I gave my concert tickets to a friend from Cornell.

Anyway, back to Mailer. My friend Dan Cody from Wrentham, Massachusetts, had been hanging around Provincetown for a while, being introduced around to the arts colony there initially when he was hooked up with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters with the Magic Bus, so he knew Mailer well enough to get drunk with him, which everybody did back then. We were there to gawk at a new phenomenon of the late '60s, the Drag Queen's Ball (and Parade), and we spent the late morning and all afternoon getting fortified. This was not the sort of thing we felt we could view straight or sober. Somehow, as the day wore on, Mailer and I engaged and squared off across a small table. We proceeded to argue, speaking in tongues, it seems, like weird twins inventing their own language. Nobody else knew what we were talking about, but it was heated, from what I was told. I suppose it was about American literature, and the novel; I was still passionate about those things back then.

Over the years, I've followed his career; I first felt a kinship with him when I devoured The Naked and the Dead early in my college readings. I really liked his subsequent alpha-male idea about being in training to become "a sexual athlete." His later feuds-in-full with Tom Wolfe were hilarious, as in this piece from a Guardian article stemming from Wolfe's essay about The Three Stooges:

The Wolfe-Mailer feud is by far the oldest and cattiest of the three. As far back as 1989, Mailer remarked: "In my mind, there is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York."

Wolfe brushed off the sartorial attack, simply pointing out that "the lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass". To which Mailer quickly responded: "It doesn't mean you're the top dog just because your ass is bleeding."

Deep below the multiple layers of bitchiness, it is possible to pick out a substantive battle over the future of American novel.

Also over the years, it's been comforting to know he was around, still pugnacious, fighting the good fight, keeping things stirred up to the best of his ability, making his transitions just ahead of me, hanging out around Provincetown. Looking back on it all, he was one of his own better creations.

ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam

Latin Mass Draws Interest After Easing of Restrictions - New York Times -- My dad was a convert to Catholicism during Word War II. We kids always assumed he converted in deference to and to please my mother, his sweetheart and schoolmate at Cleveland Heights High who lived in a house with big sycamores on Grandview, right behind his house on Bellfield. Talking to him towards the end of his life, a few years ago, we were surprised to find out that he became a Roman Catholic not because of mom but because of the ritual and the pageantry of the Mass per se, the old ceremony that reached out and grabbed him one Sunday in the Pacific, when a friend invited him to Mass.

Now here comes that same old ritual and pageantry back at us with the pope's giving blanket permission to revive the Latin Mass locally, on an ad hoc basis. I wonder if we sixty-somethings will be pressed into service as altar boys again until the younger generations get up to speed? Et introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

As I skimmed over the NYT article, a name from the past popped up, and I had to go to my alumni directory to validate the fact that Father Baldovin and I were contemporaries at the College of the Holy Cross in the '60s, and we were. The fact that we had to attend mandatory daily Mass with sign-in cards for our first few years there may account for the fact that he seems less than enthusiastic about the promise of this Latin-Mass revival. Personally, I'm really looking forward to it, but I wasn't permanently emotionally scarred by the daily sign-in experience; I never took it too seriously and got a lot of napping and/or homework done.

If you need to brush up, or check it out for the first time, you can do so here.

again, they're getting set to talk the talk, to sing the sad foreclosure song; they know some of the words, but not the tune

I got this notice from CoolCleveland's weekly newsletter. I hope they, the "experts," will begin to address the real causes, instead of focusing merely on the subprime and the substandard markets. This is about more than just ministering to the poor and the downtrodden, and being paid to spout platitudes about something you know little about, something that happens to "those people"; it's about neglecting to challenge those who are hiding behind the law to plunder the American neighborhood, because they're your funders and financial contributors:

Foreclosure Crisis: Shaping the Consumer Response

Learn more about one of this region's hottest topics at this informative conference, held Fri 11/9 starting at 8:30AM at Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave. The conference will feature national and regional experts, presenting strategies to combat predatory lending and payday lending. Among the speakers will include Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann. An overview of Governor Strickland’s Foreclosure Task Force will be also presented. Free parking is available off the E. 22nd St and Prospect Ave. entrance to the church. The conference agenda and registration form can be found at http://www.organizeohio.org. For more information call 431-6070.

Callahan's heads up on BBC story about Cleveland

BBC NEWS Business Foreclosure wave sweeps America --Bill Callahan linked to this fairly comprehensive story by the BBC about Cleveland's preeminence in the foreclosure arena. There's a good quote from Jim Rokakis and a really neat map with four different data perspectives.

The one thing I haven't seen yet is talk of why lenders are negotiating more with foreclosed borrowers on either coast than they are the people of Cleveland and Pittsburgh. One of our friends on the West Coast tells us that the people who oversee the foreclosed-mortgage portfolios, the blocks of foreclosed housing, want to hang onto the properties of the Midwest, because they have fallen--relatively--less than the properties on the coasts and have therefore retained a greater percentage of their original, or book, value. Our properties in Cleveland bolster the sick portfolios of the lenders, who want our properties for themselves, to make their handiwork look not as serious as it really is, outside the Midwest.

These are not nice people. They deserve few breaks and little compassion.