Contagion of Chaos

I wish millions of Americans had read John R. Talbott’s The Coming Crash in the Housing Market: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Protect Your Most Valuable Investment when it was published in April of 2003. And for those who didn’t read that, it would have been nice if a few million Americans would have read his book, Sell Now!: The End of the Housing Bubble in the beginning of 2006. Millions of dollars and thousands of foreclosures might have been stopped if the media had made us aware of these books.

            Talbott published Obamanomics in July of 2008 before he was elected, warning what Obama might bring to economic markets here and abroad. Maybe because it is still not acceptable to criticize Obama in much of the media, we hear little about Talbott’s newest book, Contagion: The Financial Epidemic that is Sweeping the Global Economy…And How to Protect Yourself from It.

            Here is the description of Contagion in Amazon.com: “Tough times are ahead and Talbott argues that the coming recession will be on a global scale, affecting economies across the world. We have had no real growth in GDP for the last ten years if purchases with government and personal debt are excluded. In effect, government borrowing and spending on the war and healthcare and Social Security and corporate give-aways combined with dramatic increases in personal spending funded by credit card and mortgage debt have funded unsustainable levels of personal and government consumption. The world’s banks are threatened with insolvency due to bad mortgage loans and will not be making new loans for any purposes for a very long time. Consumption, by definition, has to decline. Our financial markets worldwide are in chaos with the inability of any financial house or big hedge fund going bankrupt without pulling down the whole $400 trillion derivatives market and the global financial markets at the same time.”

Talbott wrote and finished this book right after the fall of Lehman and the TARP bailout engineered by Paulson, Bush, and Congress. Yet, as I read this book, I was astounded that what were predictions then have already been nearly 100% accurate and it’s only been a few months since publication. As I’ve been reading this book on my Amazon Kindle, I kept wondering if Talbott will get something wrong.

If he doesn’t get something wrong, we are all in deep trouble.

I don’t need to read a book to figure out the economic black hole we’re in. The government borrows and spends trillions within the first six weeks of Obama’s administration. The GDP falls (revised down 6.2% last quarter), job losses widen, Detroit automakers and auto suppliers teeter close to bankruptcy (even with the last government handout) while the government owned banks (Citibank and others,) Fannie and Freddie, and AIG keep asking for more government money before they land in total insolvency. GE, the model of industrial strength and reliability, has its stock near $8 a share and even Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, the highest valued stock in the world, has fallen 44% in a year. In his yearly address to shareholders, Buffett admitted that the U.S. economy will certainly be in “shambles” in 2009 and “probably well beyond.” Yet, Buffett, with his characteristic optimism, wrote, “America’s best days lie ahead.”

Don’t bet Talbott on that one. He believes that as the baby boomers begin their retirement years, there is no way that Medicare and Social Security will be solvent. The older citizens will battle the younger ones for limited dollars and jobs will remain scarce. He also believes that the companies that caused havoc to our economy and wouldn’t survive without government help shouldn’t survive. This list includes AIG, GM, and Citigroup. If what they did over many years leads them to bankruptcy, so be it. The strong will come in and buy them out or they will get stronger after bankruptcy.

Bush and Paulsen begrudgingly set the tone of “bailout nation” and Obama’s gang is continuing the bailouts at an accelerated pace, giving more money to AIG, Fannie Mae, Citibank, and Bank of America. They are also proposing helping home owners who can’t pay their mortgages to avoid foreclosures with “cramdown” provisions that banks and mortgage companies must provide.

Who knows if or when the bailouts will ever end? Nothing seems to be giving anyone any confidence and helping the economy heal.

Jim Cramer, certainly no fiscal conservative, has been vehemently opposed to the “radical agenda” of “President Polosi, I mean Obama,” as he jokingly refers. This “White House of Pain” has presided over what Jim called “the greatest wealth destruction I have seen by a US president.” When Obama’s press secretary laughed and commented that Jim Cramer’s television audience was “small,” Jim shot back that “the only thing small about my audience is their 401Ks, pension plans, and annuities.”

Yet, Jim doesn’t yell to get people stuck in despair to do nothing. He wants people to “stay in the game.” It is important to look at your retirement statements regularly, not just stay away. Investor Todd Harrison (“Investors Assume the ‘Ostrich Position,” Minyanville.com, March 4, 2009) wrote about a member of his family who told him last September when buying GE and Apple that “Things will eventually go back up. It always does.” Now, he just stops looking at his account.

Instead of burying your head and hoping for the best, Harrison writes, “be proactive” He compares financial awareness to going on a scale.  “Just because you ate donuts—whether they look like Citigroup or smell like General Electric—doesn’t mean you must continue to operate in the same manner. Read the ingredients, look at the expiration date, balance your budget and be psyched—genuinely psyched—that you’re gonna look and feel better than you did yesterday.”

Talbott recommends gold and cash and TIP funds (funds that pay based on the inflation rate.) Others recommend looking at the long term but making sure that we don’t lose interest and stop watching the markets. No matter how pessimistic we are in this contagion of financial chaos, we should not bury our heads. We need to take action every week and weigh ourselves financially so we don’t crumble under the psychological weight. We need to stay strong and be positive that we will survive whatever Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, and the markets throw at us.

What else can we do?

 

 

 

 

Confessions from the Killing Fields

Confessions from the Killing Fields

 

The horrifying secrets held by thousands of elderly Ukrainians had been kept hidden from the world for 60 years. Soviet secrecy and anti-Semitic apathy buried the other side of the Holocaust in the same deep, dark holes in which over one and one half million Jews were killed and shoved into the earth.

            The killing fields have been slowly and meticulously uncovered since 2002, thanks to a French Roman Catholic priest who simply wanted to understand what his grandfather meant when he said that, “for others (in Rava-Ruska, just outside of Poland) it was worse.” When Father Patrick Desbois visited the town in 2002, he asked the mayor where the 18,000 Jews who had been killed in Rava-Ruska had been buried. The mayor said he did not know.

            A year later, the new mayor of Rava-Ruska took the priest to a forest where over 100 villagers had gathered, waiting to tell their secret stories and help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet. Thus began the priest’s travels into the heart of the killing fields and his journey to find every mass grave hidden beneath the Ukrainian earth.

            Father Desbois, author of Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, visited the Jewish Center of West Bloomfield on February 24th to present his findings in front of hundreds of Detroit area Jews. The video and photos and stories that Desbois shared brought gasps from the crowd of hundreds. Many Jews have for years wondered about their Ukrainian Jewish ancestors, trying to imagine how they had lived and died.

The answers are devastating. In the six years that the priest crisscrossed the Ukraine countryside to locate every possible grave (he has uncovered over 800 mass graves so far,) collect artifacts of rusty bullets and shell casings, skulls and bones, and record video testimonies from eyewitnesses, what he discovered was unimaginable. The elderly men and women who were children during the Holocaust pored out their stories to him, almost all of them wondering why they weren’t asked about their experiences before. They admitted that they were silent for six decades because simply no one had ever asked them what they had witnessed.

The priest and his team listened without judgment as hundreds of eyewitnesses told them what they remembered. After reading Soviet and German documents and asking questions to try to understand the details of the mass killings, he listened to stories about Jewish neighbors, acquaintances, friends, and even schoolmates who were killed publicly in front of swarms of onlookers. They were murdered brutally, individually, and often publicly, near their homes, shot into pits or in open fields, sometimes buried alive, and often within sight of the children who were condemned to remember such atrocities. 887 Ukrainian witnesses, who had been forced as children to dig graves, carry Jews, step on Jews, and sell their clothes had been traumatized as children and when asked, wanted to reveal everything before they died.

They had seen thousands of slayings by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel. The Nazi killers were advised by law to eliminate the Jewish people, one by one, only one bullet per Jew. The Father often repeated the horrifying refrain: “One Jew, one bullet; one bullet, one Jew.”

I am still haunted by the book and will never forget the overwhelming image that Desbois heard over and over. So many women and children and elderly men were each shot by a bullet in the back of the head, fell or pushed into graves, some without bullets and buried beneath others, then covered with dirt. Here is the memory mentioned often by these witnesses that seers the soul: the oft-repeated image of Jews alive and dead, buried together: how the “earth moved for three days.”

Why did the Father spend nine months each year and why is he still working to research unending tragedies? He is motivated by family history, an intense belief in ethics, his undying faith in God, and his fervor for remembrance. Ever since working with Mother Theresa and after studying Hebrew and Jewish history, he has devoted much of his life to working to improve relations and communications between Christians and Jews and is an advisor to the Vatican on Jewish relations. He told us how the Cain and Abel story had impacted him, especially when the Lord said to Cain, “The voice of thy brother’s blood cries to me from the ground.” Desbois told us that he works tirelessly to uncover each Jewish soul because he hears these words, “Where is your Jewish brother?” 

He toils to help us bury our dead, symbolically. On the last day in December 2007 he led a group of Ukrainian Jews who drove to Rava-Ruska from Lviv, an hour away, and gathered in the snow around the grave to recite Kaddish. For Desbois, the ceremony in the woods was a high mark after his years of unbearable work and part of the reason for his efforts. The Jews from Ukraine did not just disappear as the Germans wanted. They were murdered one by one and dumped into the earth. Father Patrick said, “I want to see these people properly buried.” The Nazis had acted quickly with savage violence, hoping to exterminate every Jew, wanting the world to know nothing. Now, because of the incredible dedication of one man, we know. We know.

In a world filled with terror and inhumanity, it is comforting that there are righteous people like Father Patrick Desbois. He has devoted his life to confronting anti-Semitism and furthering Catholic-Jewish understanding, which are “acts of loving kindness.” Father Desbois said he hears these Jewish souls “crying from earth unto heaven.” Because of the efforts of one righteous man, we can now hear again the muffled cries of our brothers and sisters.

We hear them weeping loudly and clearly now.

And We Will Never Forget Them.

Motor City Memories

 

“I’m a very good driver,” Ray repeated in a nasal autistic accent. When I last saw the movie, Rain Man, I relished hearing Dustin Hoffman recite the line, “I’m a very good driver,” and when he got his chance, he jerked and swerved but didn’t get into a bad accident with the help of his brother.

            My mind swerved to the Driver’s Ed days at Clarenceville High when I’d sit in Mr. Weddle’s room every Saturday morning during the fall of my junior year. This was football season and Mr. Weddle was the coach of our Trojans, one of the teams sitting near the bottom of the Class D league. I was in the Marching Band and had to watch the bloodbaths every Friday night and play my cornet covered in a heavy, foolish-looking Trojan uniform before, at halftime, and after the games. I rarely paid much attention to the game except to watch the opposing team’s score rising during the night to a typical 49-10 or 52-7.

            I felt sorry for Mr. Weddle as he trudged into class, looking tired and angry. He’d put his hat on the desk and then ask us in his typical pissed-off voice, “Okay, conviction for which of the following carries the highest number of points? A. reckless driving, B. hit and run with property damage, C. driving without a license, D. passing a stopped school bus unloading children.

            I didn’t know the answer and I didn’t look forward to going out to drive with the high school coach and two other kids on his errands, to his house, dry cleaners, or the gas station. But that’s just what I did, as he would lie back in his seat and doze off. “Goldman, the dry cleaner is on Middlebelt and 6 Mile Road. Do you know how to get there?” I think so, I would say meekly as I tried to figure out the difference between a right and left turn and where my darn blinkers were. Sometimes, he would wake and slam on the brake violently, sensing we were inches from a head-on.

            When he had me parallel park between two cars, I cut the wheel as hard as I could and pulled up slowly, carefully, until I felt a slight bang in the front end. “Goldman, do you know what you did?” No, coach, what did I do? “You hit my car, that’s what you did; do you enjoy smashing cars?” The laughter was loud and continual in the back of the car as I quickly apologized.

            Even today, my kids and wife think I don’t know how to parallel park. My daughter, Ilana, says that I’m a terrible parker. I counter, “I’m a very good parker,” as close to Dustin as possible.

            I wasn’t much better in the first year after I got my license. My dad hated taking me driving and yelled at me when I slid off the road or made a wide turn. In the first winter, I drove down Rensellor and slid in the snow, scraping the right side of another car perfectly parallel to mine. My ’68 Ford Custom didn’t have front-wheel drive, air bags, or special brakes. It was made to crash into other cars.

            I remember only the scariest moments: spinning in a complete circle three times at Grand River and Telegraph on an icy morning and not crashing into anything; standing on Coolidge and Maple in the middle of a snowstorm after a double feature movie while the car slowly slid right toward the ditch as I turned the wheel as fast as I could.

            Out of state incidents were no better: the midnight drive through the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee with two friends, the “Fog Ahead” sign barely visible, the curves along the mountainside imperceptible in the pitch-black. Rob slept in the back as Scott and I grimaced that this was going to be our last night alive. I latched onto the tail lights of a semi and kept within ten feet as long as I could, hoping the truck wouldn’t lurch over the edge.

            Or the scenic tour from LA to Palm Springs in the middle of day, in the high elevation and continual winding roads that seemed to never stop. For almost four straight hours, I looked straight, away from the beauty of the cliffs below and held on to the steering wheel for dear life, hoping the curves along the mountains would soon stop. Judy held our first child, Kyle, in her belly as I felt the unbearable responsibility, holding the power of my entire family’s lives in my sweat-filled hands.

            My auto memories are not always drenched with dread. When I went from a Wayne State University class into the parking structure on Second Street and couldn’t find my car, I worried a little, but when the parking attendant said that he saw the Yellow Custom driven away a few minutes earlier, I was puzzled: who would steal that rusted, dilapidated junk-yard piece of crap?

            Lonnie Baker, that’s who, Lonnie-escaped-from-prison Baker, whom the police found a few days later when they pulled the car over and Lonnie, with the biggest afro in the history of the seventies, pulled out the driver’s license in the glove compartment and showed the officer his mother’s name, Rochelle Goldman. The police didn’t quite believe that Lonnie was Jewish.

            I had said my goodbyes to the Ford until the police called my parents’ house, telling me to come to court and testify. They said they picked up the thief and needed my corroboration.

            I was terrified and sweaty in court, as if Raymond Burr himself was going to grill me on the stand. When I put my hand on the bible, I was hoping it was the one-and-only Torah given to Moses. I panted and prayed and felt my heart pounding in my throat as Lonnie walked by. His afro almost touched the hanging light, his eyes pierced mine as if to say the stolen car was the least of my problems.

            When his attorney asked how valuable my car was and if I spent a lot on maintenance, I said that I just had gotten an oil change and new filter. He called me a smart-mouth and made me recall when I last changed the tires. When I said I couldn’t remember, I felt like a fraud taking a lie detector test. I was that scared.

            I wasn’t that scared when my best friend, Rob, had his first car stolen at Wayne. It was becoming almost routine and he called the insurance agent when he realized it had disappeared.

His second stolen car was a bigger problem, at least for me. When a few friends and I came out of the Telex Theatre on Telegraph and Ten Mile, we knew something was wrong. There was nothing in our parking spot. I looked at the spot, turned left, looked right, and bent my knees to see if I was missing something.

            I was. I was missing my Journal from my English class. This was no ordinary assignment; it was the journal we had kept since the beginning of class many weeks earlier, the homework that was going to comprise 75% of the course grade. I couldn’t believe my luck. A stolen car was not so bad, but how was I going to get all my words back from the last 8 weeks? There were no computers, no saved documents. This was all I had written, all I had prepared for the class.

            The teacher said the “Missing Journal” stolen with a car was a first in the annals of reasons for homework not turned in. He had heard of feet stuck in toilets, dead grandmas, and dogs that ripped papers apart, but a stolen car with the entire semester assignment inside was a new one.

            The missing journal was never found. I started a new one that was incomplete but my teacher was thoughtful and gave me a B anyways.

            I sometimes wonder if the thief who stole Rob’s car ever sat and started reading my journal. I don’t remember what I wrote but it was personal and meaningful, at least to me. Did he laugh or cry or say, damn, I’m really glad I stole this car? Or did he say, what a piece of luck? I could have found an expensive radio or jewelry but instead I got stuck with the “Life and Times of Arnie Goldman.”

2008 Schmuck of the Year

Time Magazine has run the Man of the Year for over half a century which has now evolved into Person of the Year. Not surprisingly, the 2008 Person of the Year was Barack Obama with runners-up Henry Paulsen, Nicholas Sarkozy, Sarah Palin, and Zhang Yimou, creator of the 2008 Olympics in China. Barack follows 2007’s Vladimir Putin and 2006’s YOU. Yes, You were the 2006 Person of the Year. Maybe you didn’t feel like you deserved the honor but Time thought you did. So accept it and move on to 2008.

            It must be exciting and inspiring to choose among those who had the most influence in 2008. But I would argue it’s a lot more fun and infuriating to choose from the dozens of worthy candidates for Shmuck of the Year 2008. Almost every week we got a few more extraordinary candidates. In November, would anyone have thought that Bernard Madoff or Governor Rod R. Blagojevich would be finalists in this prestigious competition?

            A few weeks ago, few of us even knew who these schmucks were. Now, you have to be a real schlemiel or dead not to know that Madoff and Blagojevich are two of the most corrupt hoodlums in America.

            They have lots of company. Think of all of the worthy candidates who can make cases for Schmuck of the Year.

            Exhibit 1: You might consider the Senators that voted against giving the Detroit automakers a $14 billion lifeline to survive a few months heroes if you hate unions, love foreign automakers, and believe that we’ve had enough of government bailouts. But I tend to be more on the side that these sanctimonious bobbleheads placed themselves in the running for Schmuck of the Year with their actions.  

            I’m prejudiced because I come from Detroit and I have watched the entire Great Lakes area being strangleheld by fear and lack of credit for people to buy houses or cars, American or foreign. Imagine the ire when you read Detroit Free Press columnist, Mitch Albom, in his excellent essay, “Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing.” (Detroit Free Press, Dec. 14, 2008) “Do you want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: You’ll go down with us….History will show that when America was on its knees, a handful of lawmakers tried to cut off its feet. And blame the workers….In a world where banks hemorrhaged trillions in a high-priced gamble called credit derivative swaps that YOU failed to regulate, how on earth do WE need to be punished? In a bailout era where you shoveled billions, with no demands, to banks and financial firms, why do WE need to be schooled on how to run a business?

            “Who is more dysfunctional in business than YOU? Who blows more money? Who wastes more trillions on favors, payback and pork?”

            Who can argue with Mitch’s impassioned plea for sanity? We heard about AIG getting $150 billion of government money and continuing to give thousands of employees millions of dollars of bonuses. “There ought to be a law—against the hypocrisy our government has demonstrated. The speed with which wheelbarrows of money were dumped on Wall Street versus the slow noose hung on the auto companies’ necks is reprehensible. Some of those same banks we bailed out are now saying they won’t extend credit to auto dealers. Wasn’t that why we gave them the money? To loosen credit?

            “Where’s your tight grip on those funds, senators? Where’s your micromanaging of the wages in banking? Or do you just enjoy having your hands around blue-collared throats?”

            You can imagine Heath Ledger’s Joker laughing to Mitch and saying with glee, “Why So Serious?” If Heath weren’t dead and the Joker wasn’t an imaginary super-villain, he might have argued that Senators Shelby of Alabama and Corker of Tennessee were only doing the all-American thing of protecting their Japanese, German, and Korean transplants that collected billions of dollars of their states’ tax breaks. Mitch fired back to the senators, “You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances? They cut their salaries. Or they resign in shame.”

            So who bailed out the senators who wouldn’t bail out the automakers? Vice President Dick Cheney, a previous recipient for Schmuck of the Year (you pick the year), admitted that lawmakers “had ample opportunity to deal with this issue and they failed. The president had no choice but to step in.” Yes, the president “caved in” according to free-market conservatives, many of whom believed that the $750 financial bailout was responsible and necessary. I believe that George W. Bush, the lame duck president, was right up to the end of 2008, one of the top candidates for Schmuck of the Year but his last-minute aid to the Detroit automakers let him slip away quietly into the ex-president afterlife without any more shame than he already has to carry.

            Mitch and I don’t have to rely on the administration or Congress to supply us schmucks. Detroit has one of the best in its ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is resting for a few months in a Detroit penitentiary and is barred from public office for five years. Kwame seems so last year. All he did was have an affair with his chief of staff, cheat on his wife, his city, lie about it, cost the city $9 million so that no one would know of his lying and cheating, fought tooth and nail to stay on as mayor, and finally plead guilty to two felony counts of obstructing justice and one count of felonious assault, agreeing to serve four months in jay, pay up to $1 million in restitution, serve five years of probation, and agree not to run for office for five years.

            Kwame must be an inspiration to Illinois Governor Blagojevich. Like Kwame, Rod looks to be following Kwame’s lead to try to hang onto his job for months as the media and attorneys form a posse outside his office. Unlike New York Governor Spitzer who might have been a serious challenger for Schmuck of the Year but who honorably resigned after being caught with a high-end prostitute after making his name for his years of fighting organized crime, financial crime, and prostitution, the Illinois governor will not go quietly into the good night.   Blago used the Governor’s office like a public prostitute, trying to sell everything he could to the highest bidder. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see Donald Trump as the next Illinois senator, if RB had his way. What made Blagojevich so intriguing was the colorful jargon he used to disparage everyone, including the next president.

             Tony Soprano seems like such a polite gentleman in comparison to Blagoman. But as a corrupt crook, he is small potatoes compared to Bernie Madoff. The former Nasdaq chairman and SEC advisor was respected as a well-connected, a “nice” Jewish man, and brilliant investor who made his hundreds of wealthy clients consistently excellent returns between 10 and 13% a year, in bull or bear markets. He was the most consistent investing maven on Wall Street and it turns out, a complete fraud. He swindled charities and celebrities, Christians and Jews. He stole everything from charities run by Spielberg, Wiesel, Jewish Federations, universities, pension funds. Organizations and people who thought they still had retirement accounts found out they had been swindled out of everything. And it looks like Bernard also swindled the United States government out of over $17 billion in taxes, enough to give GM, Ford, and Chrysler their urgent bridge loans.

So when you look in the dictionaries in the years to come, the word, “Schmuck,” may have Madoff’s photo within the frame.

            How could Bernie Madoff have gotten away with this “Ponzi scheme” for so long? It turns out that Harry Markopolos was on the trail since 1999, when he began to investigate Madoff’s operation and noticed even then the fraud that was going on. He worked with mathematicians and complained to the SEC’s Boston office in 1999 and submitted a report in 2005 that it was “highly likely” that “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi scheme.” In the report, he said he was also worried about the “the personal safety of myself and my family.” But like so many other warnings unheeded by the useless SEC and the federal government, nothing was done.

How many billions of dollars has Christopher Cox, the appointee of George W. Bush, cost investors in the seven years he has “led” this regulatory agency? Not surprisingly, the regulators didn’t regulate. And trillions of dollars have been lost.

The Schmuck list is long and wide and certainly could be led by SEC chairman, Christopher Cox. As Jim Cramer said, Cox is an “idealogical fool,” enough to be a regular on Jim’s Wall of Shame and get the Plaxico award from him as well. Cox was in charge of policing the men who traded stocks and bonds, who jacked up oil futures to $147 a barrel and then brought them back down to under $40 a barrel. His loyalty to the Bush free-market credo led to so many billions being lost by investors. Who can name all the interesting trading vehicles that were allowed and that led to the ruin of so many? One schmuck was Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, one of the biggest companies to go under.  Lehman was also the company that used the most credit derivatives in which its tentacles branched out around the world. In 2001, Lehman Brothers (Europe) published an 86 page document called “Credit Derivatives Explained,” which is the document that explained all of the complex mathematical formulas behind Collateralized Debt Obligations, Arbitrage CDOs, Synthetic CLOs, just to name a few.  The many reasons for the financial collapse are revealed within its pages.

              Schmucks like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulsen, and Cox allowed banks and insurance companies to be like financial high-stakes poker players. And Wall Street mavens like Stanley O’Neal replaced by John Thain of Merrill Lynch, Ed Liddy of AIG, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, and Fuld all made over 50 million dollars each and were allowed to keep their winnings. Add Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae, Angelo Mozilo from Countrywide Financial, Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, Dick Syron of Freddie Mac. Add Chuck Prince of Citibank and Bob Rubin, former Treasury Secretary and advisor to Barack Obama who has been on the Citigroup board for years, making over $100 million. How much money can a schmuck keep if we keep letting them keep it? As long as they aren’t from Detroit car companies, I guess the answer is: unlimited.  

               We just keep forgetting all the shmucks who ruined the financial futures of so many unknowing Americans. The list is virtually endless but certainly one of the crown jewels of schmuckdom was the former Chairman and CEO of Washington Mutual, Kerry Killinger. Chairman and CEO Kerry Killinger had pledged in 2003, “We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe’s/Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we’ve done our job, five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.

               ”Killinger’s goal was to build WaMu into the “Wal-Mart of Banking,” which would cater to lower- and middle-class consumers that other banks deemed too risky. Complex mortgages and credit cards had terms that made it easy for the least creditworthy borrowers to get financing, a strategy the bank extended in big cities, including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers’ incomes and assets. WaMu setup a system of dubious legality that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients. Variable-rate loans, and Option Adjustable Rate Mortgages in particular, were especially attractive because they carried higher fees than other loans, and allowed WaMu to book profits on interest payments that borrowers deferred. As WaMu was selling many of its loans to investors, it did not worry about default.

   It can now be said that Killinger helped kill housing and the financial industry both, helping to contribute to the killing of America’s economy.

  Of course, the setting was already set in the last eight years that led to our culture of schmucks. This leadership was certainly supplied by the 43^rd President of the United States. “Today, Bush’s legacy to his successor is two unresolved wars, a global image that is deeply tarnished, and the greatest economic crisis in modern times,” writes the editorial staff of the conservative magazine and website, Newsmax (“Bush’s Legacy: Conservatives Were Betrayed,” www.newsmax.com.) The editorial is as critical as any from the New York Times when it writes, “Bush, in fact, has decimated the Republican brand. Bush oversaw the greatest increase in discretionary social spending in history as the federal government usurped new powers in its war on terror. He placed the United States on a global interventionist path for the elusive goal of ‘democracy.’

  The Newsmax staff write that his administration “pushed the Federal Reserve for easy money as his administration turned a blind eye to far out banking practices, such as zero percent equity mortgages and Wall Street financial practices that were motivated by greed, not good business sense.”

 Without George W. Bush, the Republicans would not have been thrown out of office in 2006 and 2008 and Barack Obama would not have been elected. In this way, the Schmuck of the Decade led to Time’s 2008 Man of the Year. Now, let’s hope that Obama doesn’t end his term with the honor of winning Schmuck of the Year in 2012.

 So who is the official Schmuck of the Year? Bush, Cox, Killinger, Fuld, Madoff or someone else? No, for the majority of they candidates, they ended up with huge amounts of wealth and were able to walk off, free of a jail cell, able to laugh all the way to their own bailed out banks.

            So the winner of the 2008 Schmuck of the Year is clearly US. YOU won the Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year. This year it’s US, everyone who lives in the U.S.

        US in the U.S. have been the fools to vote for the president, governors, and Congress. We’ve been the fools to invest with Madoff, to buy needless stuff borrowed on countless credit cards and on our homes. We’ve been fools to borrow more than we could afford, to be sold by high-pressure sales organizations, to believe that fairness still works. We’ve believed that the government will save us by borrowing even more trillions to bail out banks, car companies, states, and insurance companies. Who knows how many others will have their hands out in the next four years?

         Mazel Tov. Congratulations to all of US for winning this non-prestigious award of shame. It should make us all want to give up our award next year and try to be smarter, more cynical, and willing to fight corruption and incompetence. If we don’t elevate ourselves to something better, we might just win next year’s World Stupidity Award (www.stupidityawards.com), which recognizes “global achievement in stupidity and ignorance.”

Rules of Disengagement

I sometimes wonder what the Guinness Book record is for the number of days that two next door neighbors refrain from speaking to each other.
                   I have no idea if that category exists but if it does, I might have a chance to make my first world record.
Judy and I bought our current house at the end of summer, 1994, a few months before Marlee was born. Now, it’s 2009 and still, my next door neighbor and I haven’t spoken. We haven’t looked at each other for more than a second, haven’t said one word on the phone, haven’t waved or nodded. The silence between us has been loud and clear.
                   Yeah, we’ve come close. When I nearly hit his car as he darted out of his driveway, I considered yelling. When his large body floated in his swimming pool as my daughters begged me to take them to the beach, I just about caved and asked if he would allow my young girls to please use his pool. When the police came in the early morning after being called by “the neighbors” who complained of our barking dogs, I almost walked next door and rang his doorbell.
                    It is just so much easier to stay away.
                    When I met another man for a business breakfast at a Livonia restaurant, it was no more than ten minutes when I perceived my next door neighbor and his two sons approaching me. I could peer them taking a seat at the table just three feet to my right, and felt finally, this was the day that the long and winding silence would be broken.
                    The man across from me kept talking at me, my eyes shifted right, I quickly shuffled some eggs and toast to my mouth and thought, I have got to say something to my neighbor. This ungodly, uncomfortable stillness had to stop.
But as the minutes slowly passed and nothing was said to me from the right side, I became a little more at ease. And when the check finally was plopped on our table, there was no turning back. The consecutive day count of silence between my neighbor and me was still intact.
                    I’ve always appreciated silence. I’ve had a difficult time communicating orally for most of my life. I used to think of myself as the shy, afraid-to-speak, keep-to-myself kind of guy. When news shows displayed footage of the latest psychopaths and their neighbors interviewed, how often was the crazy guy described as “nice but kind of a loner?” Except for their compulsion towards angry violence, the similarities between the desperate loners and me were often eerie.
                    Maybe it’s a guy thing. When a good friend and I sat in the family room at a high school graduation party, we discussed the importance of us not meeting anyone new, not saying hello to strangers, and making sure there was absolutely no eye contact. Rick said he believed it was critical for him to “limit his contacts.” We invented a verbal handbook for our “rules of disengagement.” We were perfectly happy to make no small talk with anyone (besides each other) and not blend into the party’s social network. We just wanted to construct social etiquette that would keep us away from the maddening crowd.
                    That’s the way I like it, with a network of a few friends whom I see every once in a while. I also like my office door shut; I like headphones on, the TV flickering from channel to channel. All I ask is for people not yelling, not fighting, no questionable or hurt feelings, and no one thinking, “why the hell did I say something so stupid?”
                    Keeping away from your neighbor isn’t so bad. Modern suburban neighborhoods aren’t what we grew up knowing. I lived in a 900 square foot house just a few feet between our two neighbor’s homes. We were comfortable to venture there, to talk and eat together, except for our crazy neighbor to the south who I thought of fondly as “The Nazi.” Mr. Combs sat on his front porch and gave kids the evil eye when they approached his finely manicured and thick, green lawn. His large boulder on the far right corner kept our car firmly planted on our thin driveway, inches away from his grass. But just like my neighbor and I, he never spoke a word to my father or mother, except once to tell them that the fence my father built was exactly one and a half inches over his property. He spoke loudly and clearly for my dad to “take the fence down!”
                    I wished we had German Shepherds to mess up his lawn. We had a dog when I was four but we had to give it away after it plopped a big mound of excrement under our couch on the night of a crowded party in our 8 x 10 foot family room on Hugh Street.
                    You have to wonder why dogs are “Man’s Best Friend.” Is it because they’re friendly and obedient or because dogs are like men? They don’t talk, they’re always hungry, they eat way too fast, they like simple pleasures, and they like to bark at neighbors. If that’s not the typical guy, it’s typical me.
                    I’m not saying I’m proud of myself. I’d like to be a great speaker, comfortable in my own skin, happy to make small talk with someone new, as my wife does. When Judy places an order late at night with a catalog company’s customer service person, she shares her likes and dislikes, her work day, tells a little about the kids, and listens to all the minutia of the phone person’s life. She can talk for hours to anyone.
Me, I hate the silence shattered by a ringing phone, someone else ready to enter my space. I must be like my King Charles Cavalier Spaniels, Esther and Chauncey. I mark my territory and want no foreign invaders.
                    As Rick marveled at my neighbor and my accomplishments, having so many years of uninterrupted non-communication, he asked what I would do if we made it to 2014, achieving 20 years of blissful silence. I said, have a party, of course. Invite family and friends and send an invitation to my neighbors to the “20 Year Anniversary Celebration of Absolutely No Communication Between Us.”
                    My neighbor might actually take a chance and come over. Instead of congratulating him by making eye contact and talking, I would just shake his hand. The handshake between neighbors would be enough to let us both acknowledge: “Job Well Done.”
                    So far, in our nearly 15 years of living side by side on Stone Gate Court, I am proud to say that my neighbor and I have never argued, never run over the other’s grass, never let our dogs crap on the other’s lawn, and never resorted to angry violence.
Come to think of it, we’ve really been pretty good neighbors, like State Farm insurance representatives.
                    I wish that Palestinians and Israeli Jews could be so cordial.

Embarrassed

I was thinking of the root of the word, “Embarrassed,” when I found the plumber I hired on our kitchen floor, squirming his heavy body in a pretzel-like contortion, as he tried to hook up the connection to the instant hot water faucet under the sink. I asked him if he was okay but when I saw his pants so far down that his big ass was sticking up, I realized that the word should have been spelled “Embareassed.”
                    I have had my share of embarrassing moments. Coming home from Dallas on a business trip to take my mom to a Sarah Brightman concert, I stood in the security line, hoping to go standby. The Northwest terminal was pretty quiet; the lines were short, as I began to lift up my suitcase and briefcase on the rollers. I took off my watch, emptied change from my pocket, and put my wallet and cell phone in the basket. I took off both my shoes and began to remove my belt. It seemed so still with the few people around me that my mind began to slip into another place. I must have thought I was in the quiet solitude of my bedroom when I removed my belt and started to lower my pants.
                    Suddenly, when I realized my pants were coming down, that I was stripping for the airport security cameras and personnel, I jumped back into the real world. I turned fast to see that no one was looking and lifted my pants quickly, buttoning everything back up. I pretended all was fine and moved quickly to my left, then went thru the standing x-ray, hoping no one had seen me. My face must have been burnt orange, the color of em-bare-ass-ment.
                    I began to think how many times I’ve been embarrassed, caught like a drowning fish out of water. I remember paddling with my daughter, Marlee, on a boat in the calm river waters of Stratford, Ontario, I came back to the concrete dock to get off the boat. I pulled up to the side of the dock and the young teenager who was working there gave his arm to pull me out. I lifted my body onto the dock and held onto his arm but either he let go or I did. I fell straight into the water as he looked down with a blank look on his face. I tried again to pull my hands onto the concrete dock and lift myself up but my clothes were soaked and the weight made it tough to pull. The boy looked at me as Judy and Ilana laughed heartily. This was one of those moments that could have won America’s Funniest Videos if we had only brought a camcorder.
                    I walked into town, soaking wet, looking for a shoe store, to buy a dry pair of shoes and socks. I had to take off wet Rockports before entering, I soaked the chair I sat on and bought the first shoes and socks I found. The rest of the clothes took hours to get drier, until I finally got to the hotel room, cold and wet but with dry socks and shoes. My daughters and wife still laugh today when they think about me, the balding, overweight middle-aged man falling into the river with all his clothes on. If they had their cell phones, they would have snapped pictures and video and played it on You Tube for the rest of the world to join in laughter. They could have played it over and over in slow motion and backwards for everyone to enjoy my embarrassment.
                    We can’t forget the embarrassments of our youth. I remember a good friend who locked himself in the schoolroom closet because his hair had been cut too short and another who had to wear a big dunce cap and a letter D around his neck in the corner of the third grade room. Locked in a corner of my mind is the vision of my second grade Hebrew teacher suddenly sprayed by a water gun and my third grade teacher locked into a closet by a student. I will never forget the embarrassment I felt when I brought my arms down hard and accidentally smacked a fifth grade classmate’s mouth into his desk, shattering his front tooth. And I can’t forget the embarrassment I felt when Judy prodded me to say hello to him in a Chinese restaurant 39 years later. “Remember me,” I said regretfully, “the guy who broke your tooth?” He couldn’t forget but told me that all was forgiven. So after almost 40 years, my embarrassment had finally been relieved.
                    Some embarrassments are not self-inflicted. When I walked out of a bathroom in a Subway restaurant, my family was laughing vociferously. When I asked them what’s so funny, they said, that Kyle, only a few years old at the time, had been asked where his dad was and loudly belted out for everyone in line and sitting at the tables to hear, “My dad is making a BM!”
                    I sometimes believe that my legacy, in the words of my children, will be “dad’s fart stories,” stories that they just love to tell. Marlee loves to tell the story of the time her friend was over our house watching TV on the couch. I was napping and didn’t know that anyone else was in the house when I let go a seismic gaseous explosion and my daughter’s little Russian friend cried out, “Mr. Goldman!” and my daughter, more embarrassed than me, said, “Dad, Sophia’s here.”
                    Today, this story is a source of great delight for her and I just hope she doesn’t tell it too often, although there’s something freeing about putting these embarrassments in print. As they say in politics, it’s better to admit your foibles rather than let others find out first. I don’t know if that would have helped Governor Spitzer of New York but it might have helped Bill Clinton avoid his famous line, “I did not have sex with that woman.”
                    I guess I’m still waiting for Barack Obama to admit that besides smoking, he likes to let out a fart once in a while. Then, I can tell my children that even great men need to sometimes relieve a little gas. And then they can turn to me and ask if I’m really comparing myself to the 44th President and fall down, holding their bellies in hilarity.

Help Us, Larry David

Home ownership is not what it’s cracked up to be. Values have gone down while property taxes have risen. Adjustable rate mortgages ballooned, forcing those who couldn’t afford the payments, out of their homes.

            The rest of us paying our monthly mortgages face different headaches.

            Exhibit 1: Imagine waking up on a beautiful Thanksgiving morning  at 6:30 in the morning, the sun shining, prepared for another Detroit Lion loss, and a turkey dinner after the game with your son home from Chicago, daughter home from college, and the parents and in-laws coming over. You walk downstairs, thankful for a day off work, as a whiff of something pungent hits your nostrils.

            Like a scene in a horror movie in which the protagonist slowly walks into a room to discover blood and bodies strewn everywhere, you look down to find brown piles of dog poop scattered throughout the family room carpet. Some are large, some are just a few dabs of brown mixed with blood, a few are wedged against the wall, and many are in a trail in the middle of the room. You scream inside like the face in the Edvard Munch painting and run upstairs to wake your wife. “Honey, the dogs destroyed the family room. By the way, happy thanksgiving!”

            Your wife, wanting to wake early to start heating up her brisket, turkey, stuffing, green beans, potatoes, matzo ball soup, kishka, mixed vegetables, and other delicacies for Thanksgiving, is not very delighted to be woken up with such a shrill message of thanks. “Can’t you clean it up?” she responds. “Do you always need to call me when there’s an emergency?”

            If you can imagine it so far, listen to the rest of the story.

            Either Esther or Chauncey, our two small Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, helped blitzkrieg our homey family room. We used a two liter bottle of vinegar mixed with cold water and placed a strategic spritz in dozens of locations over the floor, covered by rags but this didn’t work so well. The smell was still nauseating and the spots stayed brown and both families were coming over to eat in a few hours. We called our normal carpet cleaning company but the message stated they only did emergency water extraction, not emergency carpet cleaning. Judy looked on the Internet to find someone right in our city who specialized in emergency carpet cleaning. I called and found out from a woman phone answerer that she had a man who could do it but it had to be cash and the price was steep: $200. It normally cost about $50 for the family room carpet cleaning but as they say, beggars can’t be choosy. I told her I couldn’t get to a bank but I was ready to write them a check for $200 in cash. 

            A few hours later, a big man came to clean the carpet. He was gruff as if we were ruining his holiday or if we were actually one of the Detroit Lions, expecting to lose another football game. As the huge hoses entered our house, ready to suck out the nasty brown messes, he tried to start up the power but nothing was happening. He stayed in his truck, doing something while we waited, and came back to our house in twenty minutes to say he needed to get a part. He took off with the heavy hoses in our house and came back in about 15 minutes. He still couldn’t start the contraption up and said he needed to go to the gas station to get more gas. He didn’t have enough to power up the long vacuum tubes to suck out a little dog crap. Judy and I looked at each other as if we were Cheryl and Larry David, thinking how this was becoming a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode. We could only imagine Larry yelling something in frustration and fury and Cheryl saying, “Larry, we have to clean the carpets. I am not having my family come over and walk around in a pile of dog shit.”

            After an hour and a half waiting, he finally got the machines going and spent the next half hour power-vacuuming the carpet. And before he left, the carpets were cleaned. Voila. We could have a Thanksgiving dinner without the look and smell of dogs gone wild. I wrote him a check for $200 and said goodbye.

            The Lions lost, the dinner was delicious, and we were thankful to have our extended family alive and well to enjoy it.

            Less than a month later, my bank statement came and when I got to the check for Cash, the $200 I wrote became $1200 that the man had cashed. I flew upstairs, “Judy, the man with the carpet tubes stole our money!” I felt more like Larry David by the minute.

            I went online to the web banking site, made a copy of the check which clearly showed, “Two hundred dollars and 00/100 cents” on one line and $1200.00 on the top line, and the date it was cashed, signature, and address of the man who got the check. The carpet man had obviously written a number 1 in front of the 200. I went to the bank and the customer service woman told me the teller had screwed up and violated procedures but that I would have to go to the police to file an affidavit. I began to wonder if Larry David’s brother might have been named, “Affa.”

            My wife and I went to the Farmington Hills police department the next day and they said that changing a check was a felony that could bring 15 years in jail. The policeman said that certainly, if convicted, the man wouldn’t serve anywhere near that time. Judy asked why. Doesn’t anyone serve the time they’re supposed to?

            While waiting for justice, we found a puddle under our kitchen sink and assumed that the instant hot water faucet, which was slow to start, was the culprit. We called a plumber but he couldn’t come till after the Christmas weekend when his supplier opened up. We could only guess the price of the job until he came.

            That night, I opened a Chanukah gift I received and brought my new Bose iPod speakers downstairs to the basement to try out. While I sat on the chair, I noticed a small puddle under the chair’s legs. Strange, I thought, I looked to see if I spilled anything but I saw nothing. I got some paper toweling to mop up the mess but when I brought it down, the puddle became a large puddle, spreading to the table and behind. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what. After three full rolls of paper toweling, I went upstairs, panicked. “Honey, we have a major problem! Help!”

            Judy came downstairs and asked if the location of the sump pump had water to the top. The lighting was bad but when I used the flashlight, I saw that the water was to the top and the sump pump wasn’t working. The basement flood was starting to spread.

            The crazy Detroit December weather, featuring huge piles of snow and ice over a few weeks, followed by warm weather reaching the 60s and high winds had made a mess of our home as well as so many others. On this Friday night after Christmas, Judy called our normal carpet cleaner because of their water extraction business. The guys said they were all working in the emergency of many floods. She spoke with the head flood man who listened in the middle of two feet of water in another basement but she was able to convince him to find us a plumber who could bring us a new sump pump to reduce the water.

            The flood man couldn’t get anyone to extract water till morning but he was able to find us someone to get a pump to lower the water we already had. The water was rising quickly as Judy and I wore our boots to get as much of our stuff off the floor as possible. We knew we only had a few hours before there would be thousands of dollars of damage. We worked quickly, frustrated by the chaos, and then all we could do was wait for a plumber while the water rose.

            The plumber came almost an hour after midnight and was able to put in a new pump. We were just hoping that the power wouldn’t go out like it had in thousands of houses in the metro area. We got a few hours sleep, only to find out that Judy’s family had lost power the next morning. They said it might be days before their neighborhood transformer could be restored.

            The water had retreated but we had to get the water extractors to come and analyze the contents. Dave the extractor came and said that the carpeting and dry wall could be saved if he acted fast. He had two other men bring six large blue flood dryers and two huge silver heap filters to sanitize the air. They had to leave it all for 3-5 days and they had to move everything we had downstairs in our two rooms off the floors and away from the walls to allow everything to dry. We went downstairs to find paper toweling and couldn’t. Nothing was where it had been. We were lost in the chaos of all of our stuff moved everywhere in completely random fashion.

             Meanwhile, Judy’s mom and dad, sister, and brother, packed up bags of clothes, food, toiletries, and other assorted items and came to live with us. While three men rearranged our basement and set up all the wiring for all of the drying and cleaning apparatus, we had four more people besides our own family of four to take care of. It was like the Brady Bunch supersized.

On the second day, the plumber came to fix the instant hot faucet. He had to pick up the instant hot faucet from his wholesaler and came back to install it. When I arrived to check on him, his huge body was sprawled out on the floor, his uniformed shirt up higher than his navel and his butt cheeks in clear view of everyone. When I asked where Judy and her family was, no one was in sight. They had clearly been traumatized by the view of a plumber with his pants pulled almost off his bottom and his asshole visible to all.

            In last year’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” 6^th Season, the Davids welcomed a black family who had lost their home to stay with them while Larry and Cheryl went through marital problems. In an early episode, Cheryl walked out on Larry, leaving him and the Blacks (the family’s real name) to try to live together. As the season wore on, Larry tried different schemes to get Cheryl to forgive him and give him another chance.

            In our “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode, which we envisioned day by day as a 30 minute episode, one carpet cleaner comes from nowhere on Thanksgiving to hose us with an extra-long stay to salvage our carpets and leave us a $1000 fraud to clean up. The basement floods, the instant hot faucet explodes, a plumber changes our sump pump in the middle of the night, the water extractor people come to move everything around in our basement, Judy’s family arrives to live with us for three days, the instant hot water plumber comes to give everyone a striptease as he writhes on the ground with the pipes, and we are left to go to the police to try to put a carpet scammer in jail.

            Me (Larry David Goldman): “Cheryl, do you want to keep the old instant hot faucet?”

            Judy (Cheryl David Goldman): Larry, why do we need to keep that?”

            Me: “I thought it might be useful if we need another one.”

            Judy: “Can you just tell your plumber friend to leave already? I need to cook and I can’t cook with his big behind looking up at me.”

            Don the Plumber: “Sorry, Mrs. David Goldman, where do you want these candles with the stars on them to go?”

            Me: “Don’t worry about them. Here, I’ll give you a check for $525 if you leave already. We have salmon to broil tonight.”

            Don the Plumber: “Salmon? I could use the fish oil. I have heart problems. Can I stay for dinner?”

            Me: “Are you insane? You want to stay with this family? Come back with clothes that fit and we’ll think about it…. After thinking about it, the answer is no. Thanks for you help.”

            Later in the episode, the police detective says, “You were really scammed. How does it feel to be taken to the cleaners by a carpet cleaner?”

            Me: “Very funny, you should have been on Seinfeld.”

            Paul the Policeman: “I always thought that I could have been a good guest star on that show.”

            Me: “You, are you kidding? You can’t even put your basic crook in jail. Tell us when you catch him. We’ve got bigger problems dealing with my wife’s family, a basement that has to be reassembled, the insurance people, the sump pump grinding against the basement wall, a hot water faucet, and more sleet and snow coming tonight.”

            Paul the Policeman: “Hey, smart ass, how would you like to spend a night with me in jail? To make it more fun, I’ll pick up Don the Plumber and he can join you.”

            Me: “Sorry, officer, do you want me to be respectful or to treat you the way you really should be treated, like an asshole?”

            That night in jail, Don the Plumber has to go to the only toilet in the cell but it’s broken. He tells me he doesn’t have the tools in his pants and he can’t fix the toilet till he gets out of jail. I yell for Judy, Larry David, my mother-in-law, the insurance agent, anyone who can help get me out of jail and out of this meshugena mess. “Help Us, Larry David,” I scream. “I promise to not make fun of anyone, especially plumbers, policemen, carpet cleaners, or water extractors. I just want to go back to my normal boring life. I want no TV show. Larry, help me get my life back!”

            And out of nowhere, Larry David appears as a carpet cleaner with a huge hose. “I only take checks for cash,” he reiterates. “How about $1200 to get you out of this nightmare?”

Extreme Help Needed: SAVE THIS HOUSE!

The economic horror story of 2008 involves home foreclosures, ballooning health care costs, the difficulties of getting credit, and the deeply troubled Detroit auto industry. The Vardon family in Oak Park, Michigan is the poster child for all four of these calamities.

            Four years ago, it was a different story. The Detroit Pistons had won the Basketball Championship, the “Big 3” was profitable, and home ownership was on the rise. And when, in the fall of 2004, 20 million television viewers watched the Vardon family step out of a limousine, many of us wept with joy and relief. Like the Vardons, we were stunned how “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” renovated their small Oak Park home to help these struggling deaf parents care for their blind, autistic son. Like so many other “Extreme Makeover” episodes, we were left with a feel-good Cinderella ending.

            Four and a half years later, no one feels good. The Vardon house is extremely close to foreclosure and help is desperately needed. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose my house now,” Judy Vardon signed through an interpreter. (“Oak Park family who received ‘Extreme Makeover’ faces foreclosure,” Michael P. McConnell, Journal Register News Service, Dec. 8, 2008,) “This house really belongs to Lance; this is his environment. He can’t speak out for himself and I hope we can save this house.”

            Three years ago, in the height of the adjustable mortgage craze, the Vardons refinanced with an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM). This wasn’t to get a better deal but to allow them to pay for Lance’s escalating medical bills. Judy said, “We didn’t have bad spending habits. My husband got laid off for a time (at the Chrysler Stamping Plant) and insurance wouldn’t cover Lance’s autism therapy and some other things like his vision and special dental work.” The debt for Lance’s therapy alone was $20,000 then.

            In four years, the mortgage was sold three times and the interest rate went up each time and now is 11.9%. In four years, the house payments have gone from $1200 to $1600 to $2300 per month. Their property taxes went from $1874 to $2852 per year. Their medical insurance doesn’t cover treatment for autism. And the Vardons are terrified that Larry will lose his job as a metal finisher for Chrysler.

            When the Vardons tried to refinance for a fixed loan, they didn’t qualify because of their credit scores. So this house, made just for the Vardons, which includes a computer that reads Braille, security strobe lights and cameras for Lance’s safety, a textured piano and toys, is close to being closed for good, or at least until someone else pays a ridiculously low price from the bank to take it over.

            The irony is brutally painful. But Judy is realistic as she signs, “Millions of others are experiencing the same thing.” She is right. Just this year, 390 homes in the small town of Oak Park are in foreclosure. In Michigan’s wealthiest county, Oakland County, foreclosures have ballooned from 2117 in 2004 to 9400 in 2008, a 440% increase. And this is before the latest rounds of layoffs and firings from the Detroit automakers, banks, and so many other companies in Michigan and around the country.

            The signs of trouble in this holiday season are everywhere but there is no reason to give up. The Vardons are a symbol of hope amidst the desperation. “We’re a close family who loves each other,” Judy said. “I feel that I was given this life to show others that you can face these challenges.”

            The Detroit area community has rallied to help the Vardons in the face of its worst economic winter since the Great Depression. WKQI-FM (99.5) raised $5000 and Seth Cohen of Mortgage Access Centers LLC in Birmingham is working on getting the Vardons a lower fixed-rate. He confidently said, “They’re not going to go into foreclosure.” (“Extreme Supporters,” Ben Schmitt, Detroit Free Press, Dec. 11, 2008)

Donations to keep the Vardons in their home and to help with some of their medical costs have started to arrive from all over the Detroit community, following the WKQI story and the articles in the Free Press and the Oakland Press.

            Judy Vardon put her hands out in sign language to say that, “Foreclosure could happen to anyone at anytime.” Yes it can, but I want to tell her: not this time and not her house. Not if we all pitch in to help in this time of Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year. Instead of saying to her and her family, “Move This Bus!” we can speak to her without words. We can donate to the Friends of the Vardon Family Fund at P.O. Box 721084, Berkley, MI 48071-0084.

            We can tell her loud and clear with our checks and our hearts that we are here to “SAVE THIS HOUSE!”

           

The Lost Treasure

The blanket draped around Cindy’s casket reads: “When someone you love becomes a Memory, the Memory becomes a Treasure.”

            The lost treasure of the life of Cindy Zarcycki can finally be laid into the ground. After 22 years of mystery and mourning, Cindy’s parents and siblings can finally place their daughter and sister to rest.

            It was only in the last few months that the mystery of Cindy was solved and that mourning could finally begin. “This whole summer was surreal,” childhood friend, Cindy Dombrowski, now 36, said at Schultz Funeral Home in Eastpointe, Michigan. “I woke up this morning and thought, ‘God, Cindy, it’s a Friday. This is supposed to be your bachelorette party or a night out together, not your funeral.” (“Now, family can say good-bye,” Amber Hunt, Detroit Free Press, November 29, 2008)

            It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Cindy’s childhood pictures were posted around the funeral home: Cindy taking pictures with her siblings, her eating messily as a baby, and with her father, jumping in the waves at the beach.

            This was what the rest of her life could have been: photos with her high school friends, her high school graduation, eating her wedding cake and a photo with her first child. But all of this was speculative imagination, just pure hope. All hopes for a young girl’s growth to adulthood ended when the father of her 13-year-old boy friend deceived Cindy and picked her up at the 9 Mile Dairy Queen, inviting her to his son’s made-up “surprise birthday party.”

            The evidence is now conclusive that Arthur Ream, the father of her friend, raped Cindy, killed her, and buried her along with her cassette tape and purse in a shallow riverside grave on a small plot of Macomb Township land that friends of Ream used to own.

            For 22 years, Cindy’s family and friends wondered where Cindy had gone. Was she alive somewhere, a refugee from the family? Was she kidnapped and held and kept away from everyone she loved? Or was she dead and buried somewhere unknown? The loss and the fears of the unknown were unbearable.

            Cindy’s sister and best friend wear tattoos now as a way to say that they will never forget her. Her sister, Constance, has these words marked on her calf: “Allways Remembered.” She says, “That’s how Cindy always spelled it.” Her best friend, Cindy Dombrowski, also has a tattoo spelled on her arm. It reads, “Never Forgotten.”

No one can forget the shock of finding Cindy a few months ago, led by a convicted pedophile who claimed he wasn’t responsible but admitted the murder to a fellow inmate last year. For the past 6 ½ years, Eastpointe detectives had searched for clues, never giving up the belief that Cindy’s killer was nearby. Now, with strong circumstantial evidence, they were finally able to find the killer. They were able to convict Ream in July of first-degree murder and eventually, they were able to get him to lead them to the place that he buried her 22 years ago. When the remains were tested, the DNA confirmed that what was left in the ground was 13-year-old Cindy.   

            Cindy’s parents and siblings are sad but grateful on this Thanksgiving weekend for the persistence and dedication of deputies and detectives who never gave up the search for Cindy’s abductor. They are thankful that they can finally give their little girl a proper burial next to her grandmother.

            Death seems so empty and pointless but maybe the family and friends can at least feel some closure and a little retribution. After years of freedom, Cindy’s killer is finally locked up for the rest of his life.

All of this can’t stop me from wondering why Arthur Ream’s son, the boy who Cindy wanted as her boyfriend, was killed in a car accident eight years after Cindy, on Independence Day, 1994.  I can only hope the grief that Arthur Ream felt then and through the years was as devastating as the grief felt by Cindy’s family.

            The mysteries of murder and unspeakable grief still linger today. The memories of Cindy seem so far away now but the sadness will never disappear. Yet, on this Thanksgiving weekend at the start of the 2008 Christmas season, Cindy is not in an unknown, imaginary place. Cindy’s friend, Cindy, said, “This is the first time she’s been home for the holidays. She’s actually home.”

            There’s nothing warm and wonderful in this holiday season for the Zarzyckis. The ending is a little less tormenting but there’s a little solace that finally there is a burial ground, a sacred place to search for Cindy’s soul.

            A 13-year-old girl will never grow up. Her memory is locked into the hearts of the few who remember her.

            That is all that is left, the memories…allways memories of a treasured life that is gone but never forgotten.

 

The Inspiration of Little Kerav

Economic fear surrounds this area like a toxic cloud but that shouldn’t stop us from looking for something hopeful amidst the panic.

            Like so many in the Detroit region, I have felt paralyzed by worry, consumed by the Detroit auto companies’ desperate pleas to get government bailouts, their fervent desire for survival. We’ve had to listen to a flurry of national negativity towards Detroit and its automobile industry and just wait for something to bring us a sense of optimism.

I wandered around the Internet, searching for something, but I wouldn’t have believed that the death of a 2 ½ year old boy was what I was looking for.

Kerav Roitman was an ordinary child made extraordinary by circumstances. In his short life, he was hospitalized in five different locations from the Bronx to Boston for renal and lung disease. For almost six months, his parents made a three-hour drive to Children’s Hospital of Boston twice a week before and after Kerav’s kidney transplant from his mother, Sonia, in January of 2008. People in Boston brought meals to the hospital while constant daily prayers were said on Kerav’s behalf. There were prayers written on his behalf in 42 of 50 states.

Kerav’s father, Brian Roitman, said that “the community, literally in a month or two’s time, managed to cumulatively…learn the entire Bible in merit of our son’s recuperation.” Brian said that “Throughout everything, from the worst times to the best, he always had a smile.” (“Toddler’s struggle inspires special Sefer Torah,” Devon Lash, Stamford Advocate, November 8, 2008)

All the prayers and hot meals in the world couldn’t cure Kerav, who died on August 1 from complications of an infection. But nothing could stop Kerav from inspiring a community to commission what Brian Roitman called the “ultimate memorial” in Kerav’s honor: a Sefer Torah. The Roitmans’ synagogue, Young Israel of Stamford, commissioned the project at a cost of about $35,000 as a living memorial to Kerav’s struggle.

A courageous smile of a dying boy brought about the ultimate memorial: the dedication of a scribe for almost a year to the meticulous detail of copying 304,805 little letters with a feather quill onto calfskin parchment. Kerav’s smile was the little mitzvah that inspired a community to come together for one purpose. “We are completely overwhelmed,” Kerav’s father said. “A Torah transcends a particular synagogue, a particular community, to become something that will hopefully last for centuries.”

Imagine what goes into creating a Sefer Torah. Each of the 304,805 letters must be perfectly written. If the scribe makes a mistake, he uses a double-edged razor blade to peel off the top layer of the parchment and then uses sandpaper to smooth the area. After completion, three independent proofreaders read the scroll and then scan it into a computer.

Young Israel alerted the Stamford community of the undertaking in October amidst the stock market collapse. They plan to hold a pre-Chanukah Sefer Torah Day in December. And in the months leading up to the completion of the Torah, children in the Stamford area will learn songs about the Torah, create a Torah quilt and learn portions of the text in honor of Kerav.

Like 11-year-old Brendan Foster whose last wishes before his death from leukemia helped inspire thousands to help the homeless and 18-year-old Miles Levin whose eloquent words before he died inspired those who read them to cherish every moment of life, little Kerav Boitman was a gift to all who knew him or read about him. Eliezer Silverman, chairman of Young Israel’s Torah committee, said of Kerav, “He was only with us for 30 months…but he always had a smile. His smile just melted your heart away.”

Even in the midst of financial panic in Detroit, we can stop and think of the courage of the parents of a little boy suffering from illness, the community of prayers surrounding him, and the joy he inspired to dedicate a Sefer Torah in his memory. We can take comfort in the mitzvahs evolving from one little child.

When we light the candles for Chanukah, celebrating the long light of hope that keeps Jews eternally hopeful, we can imagine little Kerav and his eternal smile. We can dream of our ancestors from the Torah surrounding him, holding candles up to his face, encouraged by his indomitable spirit.

Here, on earth, in these dark times, we must grab hold of whatever source of courage and strength we can wrap our hands around.