In a follow-up to a story we published in March, our featured homeowner still lives defiantly without payments or eviction for more than a year.

Published at Miller-McCune.com

It’s been almost a year since Horatio Bernard effectively lost his Baltimore row house to foreclosure and roughly 15 months since he last made a payment on his primary mortgage.

And yet to his amazement and those following his story, Bernard continues living in the home with his ailing mother without any sign of an eviction notice or word from his lender, in this case JP Morgan Chase and then US Bank.

“I haven’t paid a dime,” Bernard told me, sounding gleeful over the phone.

Full article at Miller-McCune.com

Police arrested 12 people today for trespassing outside the Portland headquarters for Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon. The acts of civil disobedience were met by similar direct actions in nine cities across the country organized by Healthcare Now and the Center for the Working Poor.

Including the 12 in Portland, 54 people were arrested nationwide.

Read More at TheLundReport.org

Representative David Wu held a town hall meeting yesterday in McMinnville where the debate over healthcare got up close and personal. More than 100 people packed the meeting room to pepper Wu with questions, but the action outside – where several hundred gathered – revealed far more about the debate swirling across the country. KBOO Reporter David Rosenfeld reports.

Originally at Miller-McCune.com
By David Rosenfeld

If you paid sticker price on the last new car you bought, you might expect to pay about 15 percent more than you would with some negotiating.

If you paid full price on a recent knee surgery, you could pay 500 percent more than market rate. And who knew you could even negotiate?

Such is the nature of health care pricing where charges are determined by hidden costs and who’s paying.

Read more at Miller-McCune.com

Thousands of Americans are defying eviction notices and exercising civil disobedience.

Posted by Miller-McCune.com

BY DAVID ROSENFELD

Horatio Bernard came to the United States from Liberia in 1982 and followed the story of American promise. He went to school for civil engineering, worked hard to support his family and sent his kids to college. His most recent experiences now mirror the American tragedy.

Like millions of others, he took out a subprime mortgage and then lost his home to foreclosure. The bank, he said, refused to reasonably modify his loan despite a federal bailout. And so now, like a growing number of Americans, Horatio Bernard isn’t going anywhere.

“I don’t understand,” Bernard said. “The house will be sitting here for six months or a year. For what? I’m willing to pay for the house. Just adjust the rate. Why can’t they do that? And they got bailed out.”

For the past four months he’s been living — legally speaking — as a squatter in his own home. He doesn’t technically own it anymore, but the keys still unlock the deadbolt and he still pays the utilities. He doesn’t know when, but any day now sheriff’s deputies might arrive to escort him and his ailing mother from the premises.

There’s a lot about Bernard’s story, and the housing crisis in general, that defies logic. Why would the bank rather evict him and take a substantial loss than draw down the principal of the loan? Answers don’t come easy.

In a nondescript industrial park near Portland, Ore., lies a solar gem that just might save the American Dream.

Posted by Miller-McCune.com

BY DAVID ROSENFELD

It was a typically cloudy day last October when Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, Rep. David Wu and Sen. Ron Wyden came out to cut the ribbon for the grand opening of the largest solar panel manufacturing plant in North America. Above them, at this 480,000-square-foot facility in Hillsboro — about 20 miles west of Portland — bright yellow-and-blue lettering towered against an overcast sky. “SolarWorld: The sunpowered company.”

The governor has staked much of his legacy in recent years on attracting to Oregon such companies as German-based SolarWorld AG. So far, it’s working. Despite a deepening recession, solar panel makers and other renewable energy businesses are among the few companies expanding right now in a state with some of the highest unemployment in the nation.

In the past two years, seven solar panel manufacturers have launched in Oregon, with at least six more planned for this year. Meanwhile, a Portland-based electricians’ union leads classes on installing solar panels, and more than 200 Oregon companies are involved in some aspect of the solar panel supply chain — all in a state not exactly known for its abundant sunshine.

Click here for full story at Miller-McCune.

Five ways to safeguard voting rights and how non-controversy could save the election reform movement

From Miller-McCune.com

BY DAVID ROSENFELD

Two weeks before Election Day, county clerk Ruth Johnson — who administers elections in Oakland County, Mich. — reported a problem with the optical scanners used to read the county’s more than 600,000 paper ballots. Johnson was familiar with performance issues in the Model 100 scanners made by Election Systems and Software. But this was different.

After the fact, such concerns might seem unwarranted. There were no major disruptions on Election Day involving magnifying glasses or a constitutional crisis. That’s partly because so many races were decided by large enough margins for problems not to take on national import and because concerns were identified and challenged in court by an army of election defense attorneys ahead of time.

Despite the ease with which the presidential election was decided, there is still much to be desired about the U.S. election system. Not to be forgotten were the deluge of court cases in which Republican-affiliated attorneys lost in their arguments to remove voters from the rolls or shut down early voting sites.

There were fights in states to restore voters already removed, several of which were successful; a Republican-led campaign of confusing mailers; attacks against groups that register voters; and misinformation to college students. Election Day also saw unacceptably long lines and thousands of cases of people finding they were not registered to vote.

“I would dispute that things ran smoothly on Election Day,” said Elizabeth Westfall, an attorney with the civil rights-oriented Advancement Project. “My blood went up when I saw the potential for challenges under the HAVA (Help America Vote Act), if that had not been undone in Ohio,” said Westfall, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision shortly before Election Day that threw out a Republican-led challenge of 200,000 voters based on mismatched Social Security records. “Had they been successful, it would have been an absolute disaster.”

Full story at Miller-McCune.com

From Miller-McCune.com

BY DAVID ROSENFELD

Ongoing efforts to limit the number of voters in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Nevada – all predicated on the fear of voter fraud and all launched by Republicans — suffered major setbacks this week.

The decisions, either by judges or secretaries of state, bring to a close several of the legal battles detailed in the latest compendium of swing-state disputes Miller-McCune.com reported earlier this week, and focus on the right to vote trumping the fear of fraud.

Full story at Miller-McCune.com

From Miller-McCune.com

With fewer than two weeks before Election Day, lawyers for both parties are in the courtroom sparring over voting rights.

BY DAVID ROSENFELD

Here’s a rundown of various issues that could limit voter access in 10 swing states:

Full story at Miller-McCune.com

From Miller-McCune.com

Secretive, error-riddled methods for cleaning up the voter rolls and how the Help America Vote Act isn’t helping.

BY DAVID ROSENFELD

Thousands of Americans will likely show up to the polls on Nov. 4 to find they are no longer registered to vote. That’s an estimate based on past elections and the findings of two leading research groups that found state-sanctioned voter purges are widely inaccurate.

Both the Brennan Center for Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have independently called into question the methods states use to clean up their voter rolls and the integrity of the information those purges are based on. Roughly 13 million names were purged from the rolls in 2005 and 2006, and while most of the removals were legitimate, that still leaves thousands likely disenfranchised, they say.

Full story at Miller-McCune.com