Sam Ali, Luke Visconti and Barbara Frankel, DiversityInc.com
William Diaz of the 462nd Transportation Battalion feels like he’s fighting a war on two fronts. In April, the 39-year-old U.S. Army Reserve corporal is being deployed to Kuwait for a year-long tour.
But for the past few months, Diaz has been fighting another very painful battle in his own backyard: American Servicing Corp., a division of Wells Fargo, is seeking a court order to foreclose on his two-family home in Elizabeth, N.J., a predominately Latino city.
“I am being deployed. I can’t say no. If I do, I face court martial. But I feel like I am being forced to choose between my family and my duty to my country,” says Diaz.
His voice sounds drained as he recounts his ordeal. He began falling behind on his $4,600 monthly mortgage payment when his employer, New Penn Motor Express, cut his hourly wages by nearly 50 percent and scaled back his hours when the economy tanked. Then, tenants who were renting the other half of his two-family house for $1,300 a month abruptly moved out, leaving him to shoulder the entire monthly payment.
Diaz wants to make sure his wife and three children—Melanie, 15; William, 5; and Ayleen, 2—are taken care of before he leaves for Kuwait, “so I don’t have to keep looking back and worrying about whether my family has a roof over their heads or not.”
For cash-strapped families like his, all it takes is one hiccup—a jump in interest rates, an illness, the loss of a job, a pay cut—to find themselves staring down the barrel of financial ruin.
For cash-strapped families like his, all it takes is one hiccup—a jump in interest rates, an illness, the loss of a job, a pay cut—to find themselves staring down the barrel of financial ruin.
These days, the contrast between struggling families on Main Street and bankers on Wall Street who are prospering at their expense could not be sharper. In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, with the U.S. unemployment rate hitting 10 percent and more than 1.4 million Americans filing for bankruptcy in 2009, Goldman Sachs celebrated one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. In January of this year, Goldman Sachs doled out a hefty $16 billion in bonuses for the 2009 year, up from $10.9 billion in 2008—a pretty staggering feat given that a little more than a year ago, Goldman was forced to take American-taxpayer dollars just to stay alive.
Read more here: http://diversityinc.com/article/7177/How-Goldman-Sachs-Hurt-Black-Latino-Female-Households/
