90-year-old WWII vet returns to home after eviction

Johnnie Hodges, who served in the Navy in WWII, returned to his home in Buffalo, New York, in time for Veterans Day after a GoFundMe drive raised enough money to pay off his second mortgage. Hodges had been evicted this summer after falling behind on mortgage payments and owed more than $70,000. The GoFundMe account was started by someone who read about Hodges’ plight in the Buffalo News and went viral after Yahoo! Real Estate shared the story.

From Yahoo!:

Hodges was surrounded by his family and friends, as well as fellow veterans and elected officials, as he made his way to the porch of his home on Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, New York. A crowd of about 100 people cheered him on, and his grandsons introduced him by simply saying, “This is our granddad, and he’s the man.”

“It couldn’t have been any better,” Johnnie Hodges told Yahoo Real Estate. “We just had a little rain, but that didn’t stop anybody.”

Read the whole story here.

Michigan City Council too under fire for leaving public meeting for pizza party

Here is the video. Click here.

Detroit News has more on some of the legality surrounding public comment at such meetings as well:

Leonard Niehoff, a University of Michigan law professor and Detroit News attorney, said the law requires some form of public comment at public meetings. Violations are misdemeanors punishable by fines of up to $1,000.

More from WXYZ news:

Garden City’s mayor is trying to say this wasn’t supposed to be a full blown council meeting– just a swearing in– followed by a pizza party.

Now we know that because the mayor and the council made pizza the priority – they may have broken the law.

Angry Garden City residents say they wanted to ask their leaders why the city sold their homes to a developer as part of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program.

Lawyer Tarek Beydoun says he knows of at least 17 homes that were taken before the homeowners had a chance to redeem the properties.

Garden City Mayor Randy Walker told 7 Action News that in the past they’ve never taken public comment after a swearing in meeting and the city officials left because their pizza was ready to be served at their off-site council celebration.

Lawyer Tarek Beydoun says he knows of at least 17 homes that were taken before the homeowners had a chance to redeem the properties.

Garden City Mayor Randy Walker told 7 Action News that in the past they’ve never taken public comment after a swearing in meeting and the city officials left because their pizza was ready to be served at their off-site council celebration.

Walker also says the homeowners had not paid their taxes in 3 years and the city was just following the law.

Many of the residents say they can pay now – but it’s too late.

Regardless of their past practice at swearing in ceremonies, this was a public meeting and the residents’ lawyer says public comment was required.

He plans to file a complaint with Attorney General Bill Schuette.

Michigan Mayor: Pizza in oven, no time to hear foreclosure pleas

This mayor should be voted out… Unbelievable…

Garden City’s mayor says residents who wanted to plead with the City Council to save their homes weren’t allowed to speak because officials had a pizza party planned after the meeting.

Speaking one day after he and other City Council members walked out of session without taking public comment from at least seven former homeowners facing eviction, Randy Walker said the meeting’s main purpose was to swear in new officials.

Those meetings don’t usually feature public comment — and a party was planned immediately afterward, he said.

“It’s a happy occasion,” Walker said. “We had food waiting. We had pizza coming out of the oven at 7:45 (p.m.).”

The explanation was hard to swallow for Nicholis P. Dunsky, whose home was foreclosed because of back taxes. He faces eviction and brought his family to the council meeting.

“That’s a … (poor) excuse,” he told The News. “We felt like we didn’t matter.”

The controversy arose because Garden City, like several suburbs, acquired tax-foreclosed homes from Wayne County before they were offered on public auction. The homes were then sold to developers, including JSR Funding of Warren, that plan to flip them for profit.

Read on.

Happy Veterans Day; Open Thread

China’s ‘too big to fail’ banks face $400B capital call

China‘s four biggest banks may have to raise up to $400 billion to meet new global capital rules, an onerous task that could pressure them to slow down lending at a time when Beijing wants them to help prop up economic growth.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) this week finalized rules for ensuring banks do not become “too big to fail”, a pledge made by the G20 after governments spent more than $1.5 trillion rescuing financial firms in the 2008 financial crisis.

The rules will apply to China’s major state lenders, a coup for Western banks which had complained that a proposed exemption for emerging market institutions would give the Chinese banks an unfair competitive advantage as they expanded overseas.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/10/too-big-to-fail-chinese-banks-face-400-billion-capital-call.html

Ted Cruz, John Kasich spar on bank bailouts at the GOP debate

Ah newsflash: If the banks fails, FDIC protects the depositors and investors of the failed bank get hosed.

Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich sparred during Tuesday night’s debate in Milwaukee on whether to let big banks fail or bail them out in crisis.

After Cruz flatly stated that he would let a massive financial institution like Bank of America fail without government aid, Kasich dismissed the idea by arguing individuals in charge have to make tougher calls.

“When a bank is ready to go under and depositors are getting ready to lose their life savings, you just don’t say we believe in philosophical concerns,” the Ohio governor said at the contest hosted by Fox Business Network. “Philosophy doesn’t work when you run something. … We need an executive who’s been tried, has been tested.”

The Texas senator countered, criticizing Kasich for being willing to bail out a bank after the 2008 bailouts, which policymakers argued at the time were necessary but the public still reviles.

“Why would you then bail out rich Wall Street banks and not Mom and Pop?” Cruz asked.

Read on.

Ben Carson clarify his remarks on too big to fail and the bank bailouts

MSNBC’s Chris Jansing caught up to Ben Carson shortly after the Fox Business debate was over and asked Carson to clarify his remarks on too big to fail and the bank bailouts. And here it is the exchange:

JANSING: I’m not quite sure I understood what you… your answer on too big to fail and the banks. If Bank of America, right now, was about to fail, would you be for bailing it out? For government intervention?

CARSON: My answer is it’s not an A or a B. It’s not let it fail, or bail it out. There’s another option, option C. There’s another tier of banks right beneath that one that we can allow people who are in that system to move to if they’re going to fail.

JANSING: So you would be for letting those people… would people have to withdraw their money and put it in another bank, let Bank of America or whatever that large bank was go away?

CARSON: Absolutely. That’s the way capitalism works. (crosstalk) Let me just tell you how capitalism works. If you’re good and you do things well, you grow. If you do things poorly, you fail. End of story. That’s the way it works.

JANSING: You’re not concerned some people will think that might be overly simplistic?

CARSON: I don’t think it’s simplistic at all. That’s the way it works. And the way Socialism works is the government says, well, let’s see, I’d better take this and I’d better fix this and I’d better change this and I’d better create this problem. And then I’ll solve this problem and I’ll look like the good guy and everyone will trust in me, and I, you know, that’s just not the system that allowed America to go from nowhere to the pinnacle of the world in record time. That’s not what was going on.