Ground causes accidents, claim pilots!

Newsflash - Pilots blame ground for accidents! A new federal study has revealed what was long suspected - the ground is responsible for most airline crashes. A working commission will release Guidelines in January for proposals to prohibit having ground in or near airports. "If it wasn't for the ground, we'd still be in the air!" commented First Officer Spock.

That last paragraph of invented news seems absurd, doesn't it?

But, every year, as my wife will confirm, around the time of the first snow, I will be bouncing off the walls at some newspaper headline stating "Ice causes accident" or "Ice causes 23 car pile-up on freeway, 8 dead."

To me, the claim "Ice caused the accident - I hit the brakes but couldn't stop in time!" is in the same category as pilots blaming the ground for accidents. Yes, there was ice present. No, the ice did not reach out, grab the 23 cars, and smash them into each other.

Actually, one of the first things they teach you in pilot training is that "Bad weather does not cause accidents. What causes accidents is the decision by the pilot to continue operations into conditions beyond their skill and ability to handle. "

The place to stop such accidents, then, is not at the point where the plane meets the ground, or the car smashes into a telephone pole -- but way back at the point where an incorrect decision was made to get on the road or in the air in the first place - given weather conditions.

The denial of blame and responsibility in the excuse "There was nothing I could do!" needs to be countered with - "Yes, there was, but it was earlier and further upstream. The outcome was sadly predictable."

I say all this leading up to another day's look at the Mortgage and Foreclosure crisis unfolding around us, particularly hard hitting in Michigan and Ohio.

I will grant that there were "predatory practices" at work in aggressively pushing very bad mortgages on people with zero chance of paying them and no idea what they were signing up for. That's bad in its own right, and should be outlawed.

Still, I and many others are struck by the attitude and mental model shown by some of the "victims." Talking to one homeowner who ran into trouble in the Cleveland Ohio area (Cuyahoga County), the New York Times today reported several comments, which I'll repeat here:

Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?
by Nelson D. Schwartz
New York Times
September 2, 2007
Maple Heights, Ohio

TAMMI and Charles Eggleston never took out a risky mortgage, never borrowed more than they could afford and never missed a monthly payment on their neat, three-bedroom colonial in the Cleveland suburbs. But that hasn’t prevented them from getting caught in the undertow of the subprime mortgage mess now submerging this town.

Over the last 18 months, the Egglestons have watched one house after another on their street, Gardenview Drive, end up foreclosed and vacant...

It is a scene being repeated in cities and towns across America as loans that were made to borrowers with little or no credit history, many of whom could not even afford a down payment, fail in ever-growing numbers....

Indeed, what was once a problem confined mostly to economically struggling areas is quickly becoming a national phenomenon. ...At current rates so far this year, RealtyTrac expects foreclosure filings to hit two million in 2007, or roughly one per 62 American households — a rate approaching heights not seen since the Great Depression.

Analysts also say that the fallout from mortgages gone bad is spreading well beyond borrowers now in default. It has begun to engulf middle-class communities like Maple Heights, where nearly 10 percent of the houses — or 910 properties — have been seized by banks in the last two years...

“I don’t think we’ve hit bottom,” says Michael G. Ciaravino, the mayor of Maple Heights. “My fear is that foreclosure rates could go to double where they are today.”

IN terms of the subprime mortgage meltdown, Ohio has been among the hardest-hit states, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association....

For a mayor presiding over a town in crisis, Mr. Ciaravino doesn’t seem angry, but beneath an affable exterior is barely concealed frustration that the danger of subprime debt became a national issue only after Wall Street began to wake up to the threat this summer. “We’ve been warning of problems for years,” he says. “I’m just a small-town mayor. Where was the foresight?”

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” warns Mr. Ciaravino...

It is also clear that the Sweets bear some responsibility for their predicament. “I do blame myself a little bit,” Mrs. Sweet acknowledges. “I feel dumb.” She explains that she was focused on the monthly payment when she borrowed from Countrywide, not the interest rate or taxes due. “Once we got the loan documents at the closing, I just came home and stuck them in a drawer.”

So, when her monthly payment requirement doubled, "There was nothing she could do." Hmmm.

Maybe, one thing she might have done was not put her foot into the bear-trap in the first place. There's little doubt that it was a trap, and it was mis-represented, and she was taken advantage of , and the bait looked very inviting, and the trap part wasn't obvious.

But, then again, that is how traps for the unwary are always designed, isn't it? Find some kind of attractive bait, cover up the steel jaws with dead leaves or something, and put it right in the path where people will come upon it frequently until they "give in" and decide to reach for the cheese in the mousetrap.

This was some kind of surprise, that there are financial traps for the unwary out there? Or that "Fools and their money are soon parted" ? From here, that looks about as unexpected as discovering that ice on a road is slippery.

Again, I'm not saying she wasn't taken advantage of. The same article has a few words from a banker, Marc A. Stefanski, the chief executive of Cleveland's Third Federal Savings and Loan, worth quoting:

“The model has shifted,” says Mr. Stefanski. “It became very lucrative. But it was totally irresponsible for the sake of greed.” Not that Mr. Stefanski didn’t notice the profits to be had. “Absolutely, we were tempted,” he acknowledges. “We arm-wrestled and talked, but we decided not to change the model. We felt it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Mr. Stefanski is no social worker. He lives in an affluent suburb of Cleveland and earned nearly $2 million last year. But he does not hide his feelings about just what went wrong in places like Maple Heights. “The whole system was based on raping the public,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Not everyone should own a home — just those who can afford it.”

Third Federal has a branch in Maple Heights, Mr. Stefanski says, and in the past, “we owned Maple Heights.” But in recent years, he says, “The predators just jumped on it.”

But what I am saying is that Mrs. Sweet mentioned above was an adult, surrounded by millions of other adults, libraries, the Internet, places of worship, bars, supermarkets, or other places where this kind of thing could be discussed. Oh yes, then there are also schools and continuing education courses. And TV specials. And weblogs.

And, Mrs. Sweet is not alone. Quoting that article again,

At current rates so far this year, RealtyTrac expects foreclosure filings to hit two million in 2007, or roughly one per 62 American households — a rate approaching heights not seen since the Great Depression.

So, this is to me the most surprising and curious part of this whole situation. In this day and age, how can it be that two million households, probably more like 4 million people, could be so naive that they would make a $100,000 or more purchase, probably the largest amount they had ever dealt with in their entire lives, with so little caution or so little getting good advice?

And, this is not just on the poor end of the spectrum. There were also people buying million dollar homes that couldn't afford them by any rational scenario -- people that already owned $400,000 homes, lived in good neighborhoods with good schools and libraries, and probably had high-speed internet to their home and wireless connections to their four laptop computers.

So, while poverty can surely diminish available resources or make them more expensive, it's not an adequate explanation for this. We know predators are out there and greedy - that's nothing new to this century or this country.

But, why did all that social wisdom, and all those resources in the books and internet, have so little beneficial effect?

There is an obsession in education with math and science and problem solving, but it seems those don't help much without this lesson:

"When you are thinking about doing something new, first seek out the tribal elders and talk to them and get their advice."

In turn, when I consider why people don't do that, one thing that keeps coming up is the wide-spread social attitude that we are not responsible for the bad results of our own actions, or expected to have or use any foresight or planning or judgment.

In other words, "Ice causes accidents."

We need to dig deeper into how this total collapse of responsibility has worked its way into being so commonplace. I have a suspicion that the term "freedom" has been confused with "anarchy", and that what people think they can obtain is "freedom from consequences of their own choices and actions."

Rich people seem to think that their wealth, or their attorneys and doctors and pills can provide freedom from consequences. Poor people can blame bad schools, or poverty, or fate for being trained repeatedly that any sort of self-control is either impossible or pointless.

That concept of "freedom" is more like the freedom of a jellyfish or slug from the "constraints" of having bones that are not flexible.

The truth is that you are free to run a lot faster with bones than without them. And, without bones, you are free to be a free lunch to whatever predator comes by next.

We get to pick what kind of freedom we prefer.

Pick wisely.


also see my post from last December: Honey, We're losing the house.
Quotes from that:

[Consultation] is also an intervention point, a leverage point, a place were we can fix something. We could take some of those same people who figure out how to sell us cars and pills, and put them to work selling us on the simple idea that it's ok to ask for help, and it's ok to not know everything, and it's ok to need each other to get by.

I think that would be a better investment than many others we're currently doing trying to clean up the messes that avoidable bad decisions have created.

There are some initiatives underway. One example is the Baha'i faith's emphasis on the process of local "consultation" among regular people trying to figure out how to make hard decisions in an increasingly complex world. In my mind we need a lot more energy put into such initiatives by many more groups, more collaboration, more social networking.

In it's own way, that attention will produce an "emergent" solution to many problems that formal analysis and huge government programs would never address.

Put another way - on a personal, corporate, and national level, it's a really bad idea to toss overboard things like integrity, honesty, self-discipline, and respect for wise people (some of which may be old people or even dead people..) It's a bad idea to be so taken with "face" and "pride" that one can't consult with others on big decisions. That's a bad road to go down. The consequences will always come back to haunt you.

Oh, and one last thing. Today's Washington Post's article on the mortgage crisis has this advice.

And beware of mortgage rescue scams.

"The worst thing people can do is bury their heads in the sand," said Jean Constantine-Davis, a senior attorney for AARP Foundation Litigation, a legal advocacy group in the District. "The second-worst thing is dealing with people that are making promises that will make matters worse."

Yep, now the people who show up with a deal too good to be true to rescue those who fell for the first trap can be actually setting a second trap. Now is a time to be very very careful.

Related Post: Mental Fog causes 100 car pileup

(photo by crowbert )