Since www.shamethebanks.org was launched on March 23 and announced on the Huff Post, the site has received thousands of visitors. Homeowners have been submitting stories, commenting on articles and stories, and downloading hundreds of mortgage related documents that are available on the site. The content on the site has received over 13,000 hits and continues to gain momentum.

In the site's short time on the web it's been featured on moveyourmoney.info, with the tag line, "Want to tell people how you were abused by the big banks? Share your story at ShametheBanks.org,where you can read other horror stories and stay up to date on how government policies affect you."

Denise Richardson, consumer advocate and owner of GiveMeBackMyCredit.com, wrote in her recent Sun Sentinel post, "ShameTheBanks.org is a great non-commercial location for consumers to share their stories about fighting the banking system, lowering their interest rates, or advocating for student loan rights. It is also a resource, providing homeowners with mortgage and loan information drawn from across the Internet and beyond, all in one location."

Richardson also sent us an e-mail shortly after the site was announced on Huff Post. "I never heard of the site, so went to see if it was a legit site -- I was thrilled that it was," she wrote eluding to the enormous number of commercial sites offering similar information at a cost to already cash-strapped and desperate homeowners.

Unfortunately not every site covering the crisis is as dedicated to helping homeowners or grateful to see another site as Richardson is. Earlier this month, in an effort to inform Congress and the powers that be about the daunting experiences homeowners were facing in getting loan modifications, I visited homeowner forums to solicit stories from people. On a recent visit to one forum I posted a request for information from homeowners who had received trial modifications and been granted permanent modifications. I wanted to repudiate the amount of "successful" modifications banks and servicers have claimed. The owner of the site banned me from the site the same day, claiming that I was self promoting, though it was difficult to read his response amongst the ads on the site.

Over the last year, while blogging about the crisis, I have received a number of e-mails from homeowners recounting their stories and difficulties in getting any relief in this crisis. Each story is different and was sent with the hope that comes with media attention. As I wrote in my last post, "Every once in a while a story will pop up in the press about a homeowner being unfairly treated by a bank, like this Indiana couple who were denied a modification by GMAC for making their payments early. The bank is contacted by the media, the situation is rectified, the bank explains it away and inevitably they simply go back to business as usual with the rest of their customers -the ones who didn't get media attention."

Initially people contacted me with trepidation and reserve, asking me to not mention them by name or location for fear that publicizing their plight would lead to retribution from the banks. A couple of weeks ago, facing a pile of e-mails, a few of us got together and decided to put a site together for people to tell their stories. I contacted each of the homeowners who had e-mailed me to inform them of shamethebanks.org and our intention. I fully expected to get push back and more misplaced fear.

My inbox was brimming the next morning.

"YES, you have my permission to use my case or words in anyway that will help another realize they are not alone and make the point the banks are scamming us by double and triple dipping ONCE they can do what they do to get our homes to auction," was just one e-mail I received from Catherine Drake. She and her husband are among the many who have had enough and feel they have nothing to lose by coming forward and telling their story.

Lori Kelly wrote, "Feel free to use my first and last name. I have nothing to hide. Except maybe the HAMP police," she wrote. She now blogs on the site.

The site is riddled with information, stories from homeowners are coming in every day, and the blogs are active. The contributors to the site are homeowners, consumer lawyers, and even some who worked for loan servicers. A few of the members have blogs on the site. Each of them is dedicated to one purpose: Helping homeowners find information and give them a voice they otherwise may not have had.

The majority of of the comments are empathetic as people respond to the stories and blog posts."I don't even know you, but your story hits home with me," one reader posts.

Banks aren't the only ones angering homeowners. People frustrated with how elected officials have responded to this situation leave their comments as well. "I went to Senator Feinstein's office a few weeks back as I had petitioned for a meeting. I thought I was going to meet her, but ended up in a room with a twenty-something aide," writes one reader. Another woman told me that Congressman Mike Conway of Texas told her, "I don't get involved in the private sector."

Bank of America recently announced a plan to reduce principal after a tongue lashings from the White House. Treasury's March report of modifications to date by servicer show's Bank of America as having modified less than 10 percent of its eligible loans. There is little confidence among homeowners or economists that the bank will follow through with this recent announcement according to an NPR Radio broadcast.

On March 4 Ocwen's president, Ron Farris appeared before the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and said, "In Ocwen's experience, negative equity increases the chance of a re-default by one-and-a-half to two times."

This assessment by Farris may be accurate, but it is in stark contradiction to his companies policies. In e-mail communications and phone conversations with Jennifer Levy, an Ocwen Bank Loan Workout Specialist and Farris' own secretary, Linda Ludwig, about our loan, both women stated emphatically that Ocwen never reduces principal, despite what their executives are quoted as saying. Ludwig even accused us of taking what they said out of context. Ocwen has been ordered by a judge to clean up their accounting, calling it "systematic abuse" and repeatedly been given a grade of "F" by the Better Business Bureau, yet Congress continues to accept their testimony without verifying any of their claims. A successful loan modification from either Bank of America or Ocwen has yet to be reported.

The public relations departments of these firms has done an excellent job convincing Congress and homeowners who are not losing their homes that they are doing great things, but the reality of the situation for homeowners is far from great and we're posting new stories as they come in.

In just one week shamethebanks.org has managed to reach more people than we had hoped. We're hoping the momentum will continue and eventually reach Washington.

Help spread the word and the shame at ShameTheBanks.org and tell your story about the bank or elected official treating you shamefully. Let them know that their plan isn't working and homeowners continue to be duped out of their money and their homes.

Why ShametheBanks.org? Because it's been over a year since the Obama Administration and Treasury announced the Making Home Affordable plan, also known as HAMP. The plan was supposed to potentially help nearly six million struggling homeowners by lowering monthly mortgage payments and in some cases reducing principal.

Several months after the plan was announced the Obama Administration, seeing that lenders had no intention of really helping borrowers, decided to try to shame them into modifying mortgages and subsequently published the monthly results of the plan. Needless to say this had very little effect on the bank's conscience or ability to turn things around. You can't shame the shameless, but that was the plan. To Shame the Banks.

According to the latest report by Treasury, just over 170,000 mortgages have been permanently modified. The banks and servicers who participated in the program have offered 1,354,350 homeowners trial modifications - a far cry from six million and a mere 12 percent of those have been converted to permanent modifications. The rest? Who knows?

The Congressional Budget Office reported that HAMP won't even spend the full $50 billion it had allocated to helping homeowners. It will only spend $20 billion. That's $5 billion less than the government spent saving the auto industry and only 3 percent of what it spent saving the banks.

Every once in a while a story will pop up in the press about a homeowner being unfairly treated by a bank, like this Indiana couple who were denied a modification by GMAC for making their payments early. The bank is contacted by the media, the situation is rectified, the bank explains it away and inevitably they simply go back to business as usual with the rest of their customers -the ones who didn't get media attention.

So what about the ones who don't get into the media? The 300,000 homeowners facing foreclosure every month. Many of whom have filled out the paperwork countless times only to be given ridiculous excuses for being denied?

Banks and servicers will string people along by dangling a permanent modification in front of them for several months beyond the normal three month trial period. After having received every payment on time and in full they will deny them a permanent modification and foreclose anyway. So far it's estimated that homeowners have been bilked out of close to $4 billion in this way. A technique paid for by taxpayers. If they do get a modification, it can be nothing more than a difference of $20. The banks call that a modification and collect more taxpayer money.

That's why a few of us came up with ShametheBanks.org. A non-commercial, not-for-profit website for homeowners to tell their story and have it published. Think of it as a petition with your story behind the signature.

As it says on the About page of the site:

We are just everyday people who have either been in the process, are currently in the process or looking into the process of Loan Modifications. Some here are in foreclosure and waiting for the other shoe to fall; some have received a modification that in the end will probably do more harm than good; and others are still waiting to know their fate.

We work our jobs, pay our bills and struggle to find a way to bring it all together for the good of our families. We've reached out to Congress, to Government Agencies who are supposed to help us (HUD and the OCC come to mind), to the Banks and many, many other resources only to be lied to, pushed aside and trampled on and, to top it off, we have been viciously attacked by others who are not fully aware of the truth.

ShametheBanks.org has not been created to make money off of the suffering of others. It has been created to give a voice to each visitor to share their stories and give a true account of what the Banks, Congress and Wall Street are actually doing to American families today.

If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people losing their home, I urge you to tell your story. If you aren't, I'd be willing to bet you are within at least three degrees of separation of someone who is. The people taking your home are banking that you won't find a voice. We're banking that you will.

There's also a Facebook and Twitter account with the same name. Yes we're amazed they were available too.

The return of paranoid politics in the 21st Century has three main charismatic figures: Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the Cheneys. It kills me how Teh Librul Media™ doesn't recognize this common thread. It infuriates me to watch them get airtime and attention. Their opinions are loaded with fail and completely devoid of fact. If they were a football team they'd be the Detroit Lions, only without the pathos. And what self-respecting sportscaster would want to interview so much fail?

Think about it: they're pushing for America to go back and retry the whole Bush administration formula. Their entire historical narrative is a lunatic revisionism. Beck calls Theodore Roosevelt, who tripled the size of the US Navy in a bid for global economic dominion, a "weird progressive" because he was a (horrors!) trust-buster. Y'know, like Eisenhower.

Speaking of Dwight D., there's something...familiar about the tone of all this paranoid rhetoric. There is, in fact, an organization devoted to spreading exactly this kind of bullshit to as many feeble minds as possible, and it's the one that called a Republican president and war hero "communist." Which brings me to my newest video creation:

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Go here, here, or here for more about Beck's Bircher connections. The John Birch Society denies that Sarah Palin actually reads their literature, but confirms it's their literature she's reading:

Does this show some type of connection between JBS and Palin? It does not connect her to The John Birch Society any more than a copy of the New York Times sitting on her desk would connect her to the New York Times Company. The photo is a symbol of the organized strength of a successful grassroots campaign to protect the U.S. Constitution from calls for a modern-day Constitutional Convention (con-con) that could potentially revise or completely rewrite the Constitution.

That's the JBS in a nutty nutshell -- nuttier than pecan pistachio peanut-butter sandwich with extra cashews. JBS materials are not as common as copies of the Times by any stretch of the imagination; Birchers organize in secretive cells of true believers and share the "special knowledge" of John Bircherism. Those JBS materials mean Palin hangs out with people who think Eisenhower was a communist.

No one is calling for a Constitutional convention either -- that's a straw man the JBS erected themselves. But the Eisenhower connection comes full circle when you realize that The Republican party of 1956 had a platform of environmentalism, was pro-labor, and based its foreign policy on support of the United Nations and international cooperation.

Eisenhower called Americans to civil service and built the nation's infrastructure to spur economic development. Sound familiar?

Eight years later, the intelligentsia of the conservative movement (led by William F. Buckley) repudiated the John Birch Society over the insane lies it was propagating. Birchers had called General Eisenhower a "communist" -- along with Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy; had labeled public health efforts "mind control;" and written apologetics for slavery. They saw "socialism" everywhere.

The end of America's conservative era finds a once-awesome conservative intelligentsia bankrupt of ideas because their ideas have nearly destroyed the country. Stepping into the vacuum, the John Birch Society "informs" the tea parties with all manner of tinfoil-hattery and co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Washington, DC last month.

Why? Because a new president has a platform of environmentalism and anti-trust enforcement, is pro-labor and bases his foregn policy on support of the United Nations and international cooperation. He calls Americans to civil service and builds the nation's infrastructure to spur economic development.

The Birchers call it "socialism" and "communism" because they always have, no matter who is in charge. The president's newness and strange name are just icing on the cake of paranoid delusion. They mean to form a permanent revolution that is really, really ugly -- and if they gain any actual power, they plan to install a system of government grounded in that paranoid universe.

For her part, Liz Cheney seems to have gone too far by attacking Justice Department lawyers, but I guarantee you will see her again -- and it's unlikely anyone will ask her about Ken Starr's opinion. It's as if Tailgunner Joe had a daughter and no one wanted to ask her about her dad's ever-growing, never-revealed list of communists in government.

There is a reason Murdoch is willing to take a loss on Beck (and, I predict, on Palin). The dumbest hour on television is AM talk radio mainstreamed onto your television for the same reason Texas takes Ted Kennedy out of its textbooks: they want us stupid enough to fall for another idiot like Dick Cheney.

For the past year I have watched each of you yapping your lying mouths all over the local and national news outlets and to be quite honest, I have vomited in my mouth to many times to count. Three different times I choked on my beer and at one point I thought it was going to come out my nostrils, which mind you, burns like a son of a bitch.

Did it occur to any of you sitting up there on Capitol Hill that the American People have had just about enough of your stupid bullshit laddened speeches about Health Care, HAMP and the two wars that are going absolutely nowhere? About how you intend to help Main Street when in fact, the only thing you are concerned about is Wall Street and continuing to line your own pockets and saving your job, which I might also add, will be on the line come next election.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really give two shits if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Far as I can see, you’re all a bunch of stupid f**ks who probably couldn’t find your own asses if someone drew a detailed map for you. But I’m sure you have no problems finding your Bank and your accounts to see if that the check you’ve received from all the lobbyists has cleared.

I just wanted to let you know that I personally am starting my own lobbyist division and will be recruiting other Americans who feel the same way as I do. The difference with my division is this to put it quite simply so that your f**ked up heads may understand it, we will be lobbying against you and when I say you, I mean all of you. My dog has bigger balls then all of you up there and he’s just a regular pound puppy. Seriously, do you ever get tired of telling the same lies just on different days.

Also, that whole loan modification program, which might I say was seriously well crafted by the weasely bastard Geither that you all revere so much still has not help nearly the amount of folks that you claim it has. By the way, tell Mr. Bernake to suck my ass while you’re at it too cause I’d sure hate to leave anyone out.

Congress, your all a bunch of lying ass pukes whom I truly hope in the coming months are voted out of your nice little positions. Hell, I’d be happy to see Mary Fargin’ Poppins in office or even Homer Simpson for that matter. I’d run but unfortunately for me I have small children that require me to be home raising them in this f**ked up mess of an economy. It’s a good thing they like potatoes because it’s pretty much all we can afford these days. If I’m lucky enough to shoot a squirrel in the back yard later this week we may have stew.

Thank you so much for screwing up my life and that of my friends and family. Thanks for running the country straight into the ground. Thanks for being a bunch of dim witted idiots who are so out of touch with the reality of the American People.

Now would be the time I’d tell you all to suck my penis if I had one. Which if I could afford it, I’d have a sex change and then trot my happy ass up there on Capitol Hill and piss all over it and then tell you to suck my surgically enhanced penis.

Oh and by the way, when I gave you the finger the other day when you were in my city I wasn’t telling you I thought you were number one. In case you didn’t know it that was the universal sign for F**K YOU.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I really do look forward to a response from any of your lame asses. Oh and the glory of this letter is, freedom of speech unless you stupid f**ks have changed that in the Constitution as well.

Sincerely and with Best Regards,
Teresa Beougher
American Advocate to Fight the Stupid F**ks of Congress

Turns out the problem had to do with an ADULT crossing guard who was letting kids cross regardless of the signal. That's right. An adult who should know that when a light is GREEN you wait for it to turn RED before you cross a busy intersection. Instead, whenever a single kid showed up (and as school had just let out there were many kids walking solo and in staggered groups), she would step right out into traffic with her STOP sign and all of us in cars had to stop. Even IF it was a green f'ing light!

Even more telling to me was the fact that even though it was about 25 degrees out, these kids didn't even have coats on. Now I well remember the "cool" kids who refused to wear coats (like it was manly or something to freeze), but this was more than a few - this was like all of them. Probably because they don't have to wait to cross the street.

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, we didn't even have adult crossing guards. That was left to a selection of us kids - and it was a pretty big deal if you got selected. That there are adults doing this "big" job is another story. But here's the thing: we were taught to look both ways before crossing a street. We didn't just march out into a busy intersection like it was our god given right and that those in the cars would stop for us. And we were also taught to wait for the light to be red. No dumb ass walked out into the middle of a busy street if the light was green.

I've been enraged and totally dumbfounded by the new trend of the past few years of kids just walking out into the street whenever it suits them - whenever it's "convenient" for them to cross. And I now see where they're learning it - from adults who are teaching this to them on a daily basis.

The bigger issue here is not so much the bit about crossing the street - that's just plain stupid - but the teaching of selfish, self absorbed, entitlement. I'm actually angry enough to write the schools, the mayor, and the newspapers because self absorbed entitlement is one of the most fundamental problems today in my so humble opinion. Reality shows and talent shows perpetuate this sort of ignorance that everyone is oh so much more important than the other to the point of walking out in front of a car.

Maybe these adult crossing guards need a "Crossing the Street 101" refresher?! Or maybe when one of the little brats gets hit the seriousness of this will land on someone.