Banksters #1

HSITrust HomeSavers a not-for-profit company

Getting Your House in Financial Order

Office: 70 James St, Suite 276 Worcester MA 01603 Tel: 508-304-9992 Fax: 508-463-0528 or 508-691-3426 Email [email protected]

L to R: Andrea, Chris Cuomo (ABC Prime Time), and Bruce Boguslav at HSI Trust HQ

This will be the first of a series of horror stories emanating from the work of HSI Trust, a non-profit working out of Massachusetts on a national level attempting to ameliorate and protect the rights of people victimized by America’s financial crisis and the predatory actions of Banks and other financial institutions. HSI Trust works in tandem with the a coalition of non-profit organization in California, including the California League of Latin American Citizens (CALLAC, I am state director).

Given the national scope of HSI Trust’s work, they are able to detect trends in the way that Banks are dealing with their customers. One trend that is intuitively obvious to them is that minorities are getting treated differently than white Americans. For example, one Bank’s employees, whether they are talking about Cambodians, Thais, Vietnamese and other East Asians, they refer to them as “Chinese.” At the risk of obfuscating that which ought to be intuitively obvious, this is below the standard of ignorant. The Cambodian language is Sanskrit based (from the Indian sub-continent) whereas the Vietnamese language is more related to Chinese.

One of the predatory techniques used by Banks to ripoff hard-working immigrant communities is to provide them with a translator to help them fill out their loan applications but then not give them a translator when they sign the actual mortgage documents. This is precisely what Wells Fargo did to a Latino immigrant family in California that HSI is currently working with, and as HSI puts it “Wells Fargo continues to ask for extensive financial documents that we believe would not be necessary if they were not a minority borrower.”

As Bob Dylan once sang, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”