Fantastic Two Weeks of Victories

I may appear like I am always ready for a fight but I am actually quite happy and content with life.

The last two weeks have been hectic, but also quite great.

I fought back home foreclosure, formed a public relations shaming campaign called OneWestFail, and received attention from the corporate office at OneWest. They just mailed a new package this week, and now my mom’s case is with an escalation specialist in the headquarters. They will not foreclose and have agreed to work with us for a HAMP Modification. Just yesterday I spoke with an LA Business Journal reporter who is looking into OneWest and stumbled onto the site. Apparently, I have quite a few people sharing their stories and putting their names down for class action. I will get back to them soon with corporate office contacts and list of lawyers who are handling lawsuits in various states.

The devastation in Haiti ironically presented a great opportunity for immigration reformers here to finally get temporary protected status. Deportations to Haiti were halted, temporary protected status granted and over the weekend I also pushed for humanitarian parole, which was granted this Monday. The intellectual side of me is finally kicking in and now I can step back and criticize mainstream media coverage of Haiti and the ongoing occupation of it by the North-Atlantic hegemony.

Anees Sous. I seriously don’t know why Mohammad feels compelled to help almost everyone who comes across our site, but I can’t say no either, so I agreed to help at least setup his site using the same template from the OWBFail campaign and push it out online at Change.org. We got a temporary victory, with Anees getting 30 more days, but only with Mo working directly with Congressperson John Conyers’ office. If we had more time, the online aspect could have been developed into a campaign to get the Arab-American community involved in immigration reform, but there are not enough hours in the day. Anyway, now Mo is working on putting up a site so that people can train themselves to organize for their own cases and all the sign-on requests can go to one place.

Today, I worked with Eric at NewComm to set up an action against the National Council of Science and the Environment to dis-invite gumball Roy Beck from their New Green Economy conference. Their ED was adamant about providing the white nationalist Roy Beck a ‘forum.’ I think the least I want from this is to send enough letters and make enough noise so that NCES seriously rethinks and issues a statement denying affiliations with the anti-immigration agenda. I also hope Beck chokes on one of his gumballs.

And the last two weeks, I have been ill so I am supposedly taking a long weekend off to catch up on playtime. I am still looking for a full-time job (resume here) but pretty happy with my current gig at Change.org as well. Maybe this elevated mood also has to do with making time for the gym daily and the full-tuition scholarship offers from good law schools in the United States. If I have to stay here in Fall 2010, I might as well go to law school for free.