The Rorey family of Snellville had the means and the will to pay their bills. They asked for loan modification in order to ease the pressure of rising costs and of sending their eldest daughter to college, and were told they needed to demonstrate hardship. After they missed only one payment, the bank began foreclosure proceedings concurrent with the loan modification, a practice known as “double processing.” The Rorey family’s story, a tangle of dishonest banking practices, predatory “advocates,” and failures of the legal system, is a symbol and symptom of what is happening all over the US but especially in Georgia. Georgia is 4th in foreclosures in the nation, while Atlanta lost more jobs last year than any other metropolitan area in the US.
Occupy Atlanta got involved because we believe that this family’s story is an example of how bad policiesand bad choices made by banks and politicians affect the country as a whole as well as individual people in Georgia and throughout the Atlanta area. We hope to support members of the local community in organizing and fighting back against the forces that have produced the current situation locally and nationally. We believe that what those in high places have done, ordinary people working together can undo. We are the 99%
