Jodie Randolph tells the story of the struggle to keep her home.

Jodie Randolph is a small-business owner in Alameda, California. She is also a breast-cancer survivor, and is in treatment for colon cancer.

Jodie has been fighting to stay in her home for years. Companies affiliated with Morgan
Stanley shuttled the loan around from one subsidiary to the other until they foreclosed on her. Morgan Stanley’s tactics have included:

• Pushing her into a predatory refinance
• Moving her loan around from company to company so she couldn’t get a fix on who to negotiate with
• Removing the lawyer for Morgan Stanley who was actually negotiating with Jodie when they were
close to reaching a mutually acceptable plan.
• Stunningly, breaking in and changing the locks to her house while she was at a chemotherapy
session.

Supported by a delegation of her family, friends, neighbors, the Occupy Oakland Foreclosure Defense Group, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and other foreclosure activists, Jodie has staved off eviction from her home since November 2012.

In a terrific initial victory for people’s action and home defense, Jodie was able to meet Monday, with Morgan Stanley. In November, when Jodie came to Occupy Oakland Foreclosure Defense, she had no prospect of a bank meeting, and all negotiations and legal actions seemed over and done.

She and her allies sat down fairly amicably with bank representatives, including a lawyer flown in from Southern California, and presented her proposal for how the foreclosure could be lifted and a fair loan modification could be put in place. Morgan Stanley is ‘considering’ her proposal.

In the meantime, the home defense continues as everyone hopes and waits.

Occupy LA member, Alex Weinschenker, died suddenly last week at age 23. Condolences to his family, friends, as well as his Occupy family.

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February 27, 2012: As part of the National Day of Action to Occupy Our Food Supply, Occupy Wall Street organized several actions including a Seed Exchange and a Seed Bombing of vacant lots, drawing attention to the threats posed by big agribusiness and celebrating the free exchange and planting of natural, unmodified crop seeds.

Mayor Bloomberg may have his own personal army to keep tents out of Zuccotti Park, there's nothing he can do to make the "Big Banks" cool again to new college graduates.

As one professor of economics put it, "I teach financial markets, and it’s a little like teaching R.O.T.C. during the Vietnam War."

Via:

The new recruiting climate was on display at Yale in mid-November, when a group of Yale students turned a Morgan Stanley information session into a protest site. While their fellow students, clad in suits and clutching folders with résumés, filed into The Study at Yale, a local hotel, to learn more about the investment bank, a group of approximately 25 Yale undergraduates protested outside. They held signs and chanted slogans like “Take a stance, don’t go into finance” and “25 percent is too much talent spent” — a nod, protest organizers said, to the quarter of Yale graduates who typically take finance and management consulting jobs after graduation.

...

Yale, which has graduated financial heavyweights like Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, is traditionally considered a Wall Street feeder school. But the Occupy New Haven movement wants to change the focus.

Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale senior who helped organize Tuesday’s protest, said in an interview that recruiting “serves to divide the campus.”

Ms. Brodsky added that she had recently begun openly questioning the career choices of her finance-minded friends, because “these are people who could be doing better things with their energy.”

Certainly not all new graduates will be able to resist the promise of high-dollar salaries and perks of the financial institutions, but how many of them are really seeking employment elsewhere?

The New York Times reports that a recent survey showed that the "most coveted positions among young workers these days are jobs at technology firms like Google, Apple and Facebook."

The Wall Street banks didn't even make it into the top 25 most coveted positions. JPMorgan Chase was the highest rated investment bank coming in at only 41st, with only 2 percent of those polled choosing it as their first choice for employer.

Heartbreaking, isn't it?