Blame Lawyers for Mortgage Mess

Be honest now. Did you ever read all the fine print when you signed up for a home mortgage?
I never did for the half-dozen such deals I made in the past. One thing’s for certain, though; as time went by, the paperwork exploded.

Today it must be overwhelming. So I disagree in part with Sen. McCain’s take on the problems: “...it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.”

Are those young families thirsting for that first home being irresponsible when they fail to read all that gibbberish they must sign? I think not. Instead, the settlement attorneys should warn them of the pitfalls. Do they? I wonder. After all, their fellow lawyers are the ones who have piled on all the added documents and qualifiers over the years, both on the real estate and legislative sides.

In my view, such weighty documents are mainly the result of past lawsuits by greedy lawyers winning huge settlements for whatever reasons.

So let’s blame them, not the hapless home owners in trouble, for making the mortgage situation supposedly untenable. There are tons of those hapless souls, right? No. As George Will notes in a recent column, “96 percent of mortgage borrowers...are filling their commitments...” Besides, how could we have expected a pleasant outcome from the do-gooder political efforts to help more and more otherwise ineligible folks qualify for mortgages, who should have been renting and not borrowing,

Regardless, the utterly confusing paper mess is happening in other areas of legal transactions also. To wit: 26,300 pages in federal tax code in 1985 but over 67,000 in 2007. And have you gone to get a prescription filled lately? You literally have to sign your life away to get the pills. Surely there’s a direct link between those required documents and the huge class-action settlements lawyers in recent years have won against the drug companies.

I don’t read any of those pharmacies’ fanny-covering documents either. I have better things to do, and haven’t been burned, yet.

And maybe you think I hold a grudge against lawyers? Not at all. Local attorney Clark Leming probably handles more land deals in Stafford than anyone in history, appearing at planning commission meetings more often than the commissioners themselves, I would guess. He’s competent, totally honest and a county asset, as far as I can tell.

Then there are the big shots who give all lawyers a bad name. Fortunately, some are being introduced to the slammer. Multimillionaire trial lawyers William S. Lerach, Melvyn I. Weiss and Richard F. Scruggs are now known as crooks. From paying kickbacks to plaintiffs for lying, to bribing a judge, they have won many huge class-action lawsuits.

Those kinds of settlements have given direct rise, I suspect, to all the defensive paperwork now being thrust upon us consumers today.

Nevertheless, don’t hold your breath waiting for any Democrat candidate to condemn the greedy lawyers. In a debate a few months ago when most of the candidates were still running, an extended discussion of what they would do about the health care mess elicited not a single word about ending lawyers’ crippling lawsuits against drug companies and physicians. After all, candidate John Edwards had been one of the wealthiest of them

Lawyers of similar persuasion drove my good friend and physician Manuel Belandres from his highly beneficial practice in Stafford some years ago. Also on Potomac Hospital’s staff as a general surgeon, Belandres was Prince William County’s man of the year once in the 1990s for having established and run the county’s free clinic. Virginia’s insurance for doctors, reflecting the state’s spate of costly lawsuits, rose and drove him and other doctors out of business. Some had organized protests to the legislature in Richmond, which had little effect despite a Republican majority. After all, most of the legislators were, you guessed it, lawyers too. And now, mostly Democrats, alas.

Not to end on such a somber note, please enjoy two samples from the book, “Disorder in the American Courts:”
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.”
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year
_____
Note: In case you missed a few columns recently, you can catch up by accessing blogger.com/home and click on "You should see this." Regards, Ben Blankenship

What Kind of Church is That?

He hit a home run. That was my first reaction to that memorable speech by Barack Obama. That was before all the pundits hailed its greatness, its deficiencies and his gall.

How dumb could he have been to put race front and center in his campaign? Well, just look at him. How could he have avoided it? He’s the gangly black kid who still looks uncomfortable in a Sunday suit and more so in a bowling alley.

Yet, as we now know, his congregation isn’t one of those quiet, sedate mainline churches. Rather it‘s a foot-stomping bunch that we cultured white folks used to laugh at when staged in full fire and brimstone glory, for instance in that old movie, Elmer Gantry, starring Burt Lancaster as a huckstering evangelist.

Regardless, such outbursts from the pulpit, like those of Obama’s inflamed pastor spouting victimization theses, do make a lasting impression, don’t they, at least on the congregation.

Well, let me think a minute. Obama must have sat through many of those sermons. I recall at an early stage in my life no resounding impact of any I heard either.

Fact is, the sermon would typically come after the singing, which I enjoyed. The preacher’s words would then let me shift into neutral and, often as not, doze off.

But wait a moment. Now I remember one time back in my old West Texas church where a sermon made a big impact. Maybe you recall a similar occasion. After all, it was PLEDGE Sunday. I’m not talking about money here, but a far graver concern, abstinence.
All the adult congregants were asked to stand up and sign a pledge not to drink booze, my locality being reputedly bone dry, both for beer and stronger spirits--except of course for the bootleggers and private clubs. Of course. So it was great sport to see some of the town fathers standing tall on those PLEDGE Sunday mornings, having been observed bellying up to the bar the night before.

Yes, ours was one of those mainline, teetotaling Protestant churches of which there were several others in my town, but oh so different.

We Methodists sniffed at the Baptists down the block, and some of us even made sure to visit their church when baptism services were slated. It was fun watching the new converts get dunked in elaborate baptismal bathtubs. In contrast, we merely sprinkled for our baptisms in a prim token gesture of identical meaning.

It was also fun to take communion at the Episcopal Church nearby where they served real wine instead of juice. And across town, the Church of Christ folks were a sight. They wouldn’t let pianos or organs accompany their singing, which incidentally was excellent. Further, we were surely not going to Heaven like they were unless we took up their particular crosses.
There were only a few Catholics around. They worshiped the Pope and they had Nuns herding their school kids in uniforms. Really peculiar.

A lot of difference it all made when it came to town morals. No beer ads, no liquor stores, but at one time, my good old Abilene ranked near the top nationally in per capita alcoholism, according to Alcoholics Anonymous data.

But me, I never touched the stuff, most of the time. Instead, late on Sunday nights I’d tune my bedside radio to the Old Fashioned Gospel Hour with Rev. Fuller from Long Beach, Calif.. The good singing came first, and by the time he started preaching, I was already asleep, as usual.

Then during one vacation to California, my parents took me to see one of the wonders of the time, a genuine mega-church. Yes, we had them back then, too. This one was Amy Semple McPherson’s Four Square Gospel Church. Its Sunday night service was a doozy. Three or four huge choirs sang, accompanied by a big uniformed brass band that raised the rafters for that crowd of some 5,000, I’d guess.

However, nobody I’d ever heard sounded so loud or as out of control as that pastor of our young Barack (no middle name that is politically correct) Obama. Maybe it’s just par for the course for such services to venture beyond anything most white folks would want to embrace.

But who are we to say? They probably don’t dunk their baptism candidates, or claim all the rest of us are going to hell, or stand up and swear to never drink that stuff again. Or fool around with rattlesnakes or multiple wives. As the true believers proclaim that Jesus once said: In my Father’s house are many mansions. I’d add, a whole bunch of them. I guess that’s OK, even including that inflammatory Chicago minister of possibly our next president.