Suppose you’re an older couple planning on the peaceful retirement life in a maintenance-free neighborhood. You take your entire nest egg and pay off the mortgage. Your new townhome, condo or single family residence is now yours….forever.
Oopsie! You learn that a developer wants to tear the whole thing down and build something new. You don’t want to move from your retirement home, but the developer gets a ‘majority’ of the residents to take his low ball offer to clear out. Not you. You want him to pay you fair market value. But because a ‘majority’ of your neighbors have moved out, what’s your fair market value now? It’s a heck-of-a-low lower than the others were paid. In fact, your quarter million dollar retirement home is worth ten cents on the dollar. Now the developer can get you tossed out by the courts and pay you nothing.
A few musings and ramblings on this watershed moment for millions of Americans.
A watershed moment is a point in time that changes everything; like the murder of President Kennedy, the crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the moment the towers fell. We all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first saw the video of the attack on the World Trade Center. Since I customarily worked until two or three in the morning I was in bed when I got the phone call.
“Dad, are you watching TV?” my son asked.
“No,” I replied. “You woke me up.” I turned on the television just as the second plane hit.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
I simply told him, “It means we’re going to war.”
Watershed moment. There’s a place high in the mountains of Colorado that attracts many tourists. It’s a spot along the Continental Divide where you can theoretically drop a speck of water and the drop splits in half, with one half eventually ending up in the Atlantic Ocean and the other half ending up in the Pacific. One is the Atlantic Watershed, the other is the Pacific Watershed. A spot or an instant in time that changes everything. 9/11 did that for millions of us.
Today, I heard an NPR discussion about the fact that 25% of all Americans have absolutely no memory of that moment. They explained that kids under fifteen or sixteen were either not born yet or were too young to have any memories of that disaster. I was momentarily stunned to realize that so much time has passed yet the memory is so deeply burned into my mind. To kids 9/11 is just ancient history, not a real razor-like scar on the collective conscious.
If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time you know that I despise political correctness. The PC movement is very similar to a viral infection. It has no predictable course, it can break out anywhere and cause untold damage to society and it can totally undermine the rule of law.
Obviously some kinds of speech and some words are offensive. But choosing not to use such language is a matter of class, decency and education. Declaring a word du jour as an illegal word is dangerous. As Saul Alinsky said, “Whoever controls the verbiage controls the debate.” And that can put power into the hands of some very bad people. Adolph Hitler controlled the verbiage. We all know how that one turned out. Fifty million people dead. Stalin controlled the verbiage. Twenty million more dead.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is currently under the kinds of attacks that nobody could have ever envisioned. It’s the amendment that makes us all uniquely American. And it’s being disassembled block by block just like a pile of Lincoln Logs.
The Washington Post editorial linked below is an important one to study. Who would have ever predicted that use of the word, “American” could be considered offensive and outlawed from the lawbooks?
A huge jury verdict in Nevada was just awarded to a homeowner against two HOA collection companies. Across the country many HOA boards assess minor fines and liens against homeowners and then turn the accounts over to their law firms for collection. It’s so tempting for an ambulance-chasing law firm to turn to the easy profits of debt collecting. It’s not unheard of for minor fines to turn into huge foreclosures. Law firms add so-called ‘collection costs’, legal fees, interest and other such nonsense onto nickel-and-dime fines. It’s enormously profitable for such lawyers to have a buddy down at the county offices when the properties are auctioned off for pennies on the dollar. A whole roomful of Las Vegas lawyers are in jail right now for similar racketeering convictions.
The law firm hired by the Arrowcreek Homeowners Association in Washoe County, Nevada was accused of violating federal and state regulations against racketeering and violations of the Fair Debt Collections Act. The jury agreed and awarded the homeowner more than $600 thousand.
The link below is to a press release by the homeowners legal team. Obviously, the press release is to attract business. But since this law firm has affiliates in many other states it could possibly strike some fear in the hearts of the HOA Lawn Nazis!
Yep, that’s the quotable quote emerging from an HOA scandal in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
Residents of the Russett Community Association voted to throw out the top two board members who homeowners claimed were misusing HOA funds. True to form, the two board members voted that the recall elections weren’t valid because they weren’t approved by the board. Then they fought the recall election in court, and of course they spent neighborhood dues money to pay for their own defense. It happens in thousands of HOAs across the country!
In this case, though, a judge ordered that the two board bullies step down from their positions. They’re not going easily, though. They’ve squandered anywhere from 80 to 100,000 bucks and more in dues money to fight the homeowners in court.
Those of us ‘in the know’ just shake our heads in wonder.
