I think the problem with long posts is that digesting all of it and making a response to more than one or two thoughts is difficult.

Overall, the problem I see is personal responsibility for our own actions and than having the ability to make a judgement call about others based on their actions.

I know that in both my personal life and my business life I always try to consider my actions in light of answering to God. Not to someone else or to the government. My personal story in a nut shell is that when I got into Real Estate, I was ecstatic that I was going into an industry that drilled into your head "The Golden Rule". We had class after class on this and than with pomp and circumstance we stood up and took a pledge of "Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us." Yes! I was going to be able to make money honestly with others working honestly! Still in each class of our continuing ed we learn some new perspective on being honest, fair, ethical and just. Than, the glasses came off. I came very close to handing in my license as a Realtor. Everyone who wants to bash Realtors, I understand. I consider it lower than a used car salesman. I have met some very honest and ethical agents, but they are few and far between. It seems that when it comes to money, the rules that are to be followed change based on the amount of money that the deal will make. After I recognized this, I changed... I changed both where I was working and how much I dealt with real estate agents. You see the responsibility was up to me. My choices were to either 1. Play ball like they do 2. Quit the team or 3. change my team. I changed my team and lowered the amount of time I would spend dealing with it. (I also will mention that during the time while my glasses were losing their rose colored tint, I did report people to the board. No one on the board found any issues with what I reported.) That is when I learned that we cannot be expecting the government to protect us from unethical people, fraud and scams like this. Though it would be nice, the government is made of flawed people also. They make mistakes, have only 24 hours in a day, are doing a job for a paycheck and have alot of ethical issues, scams and frauds to chose from to stop. We live in a very amoral society. If things are going to change, it will have to be done from the ground up. If people begin by taking personal responsibility for their choices, these frauds and scams would die on the vine. No one would work for them and on one would invest with them.

In view of all of this, very humbly I would like to submit to re-founding mother, that your choices were the same as mine and everyone elses. It seems that you, of all people, should have had an inkling a long time ago that Metro Dream Homes was not investing as they said they were. I suspect that at that point, they were still paying you so it wasn't that big of an issue. Perhaps they led you to believe that they would be investing in the near future...but whatever the reason was, you justified it in your mind and continuted to do work for them. Ask yourself, if they sent you all the money they owed you in a check on July 2007, would you be posting here? Would you be trying to raise cane now? What if they came to you tomorrow, paid you and asked you for more advice, what would you say?

I do not want to give the impression that the government should not be doing something. They should. Many laws were broken. Many people should go to jail and make restitution. I will still turn in to DPOR anyone that I run across who has broken the law. But we are all grown ups here and know that full justice won't happen. Here is what I wonder? How many of us are more upset that some of them (or all of them) are going to walk with maybe a slap on the wrist but still have all the money, cars, trips and memories? We are really jealous that they got the good stuff. I think that makes us just as guilty as them. The only difference is that they have more balls. Things will only change when we take personal responsibility. When we say, no matter what the cost, I will not participate in this.