Disinformation » Foreclosure

Ex-Marine Reoccupies His Own Foreclosed Home

Jin_TheNinja — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:28:25 +0000

There seems to be a trend by the Big Banks- wherein they resist all attempts to modify mortgages and commence foreclosure proceedings without justification. Private Property- what does it truly mean in a capitalist system? Via Democracy Now :

Occupy Minneapolis Forms Human Chain To Defend Foreclosed Home, Police Retreat

JacobSloan — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:58:42 +0000

Shocking police confrontations with the Occupy movement are not limited to the coasts, don’t ya know. Protesters in Minneapolis challenged the police directly to protect a woman’s home and won:

November 19th, 2011: Following two arrests and an incident in which a police officer tried to run down an occupier with a squad car, Occupy Minneapolis formed a human chain around Sa’ra Kaiser’s foreclosed home, preventing the officers from boarding it up, and ultimately forcing the police – who had no legitimate legal pretense for preventing occupiers from being there in the first place – to give up and leave.

Top Foreclosure Firm’s Homelessness-Themed Halloween Party

JacobSloan — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:48:41 +0000

Sometimes Halloween costume choice can offer an interesting window into people’s mindsets. Via the New York Times:

The law firm of Steven J. Baum, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

A former employee recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against. When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both.

States To Offer Banks Legal Immunity Concerning Improper Foreclosures

JacobSloan — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:34:29 +0000

To be fair, actually suing the banks for all they’ve done wrong would be unfeasible, because there’s so much of it. Reuters reports:

State attorneys general are negotiating to give major banks wide immunity over irregularities in handling foreclosures, even as evidence has emerged that banks are continuing to file questionable documents.

A coalition of all 50 states’ attorneys general has been negotiating settlements with five of the biggest U.S. banks that would include payment of up to $25 billion in penalties and [promises] to follow rules. In exchange, the banks would get immunity from civil lawsuits by the states, as well as similar guarantees by the Justice Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

State and federal officials declined to say if any form of immunity from criminal prosecution also is under discussion. The banks involved in the talks are Bank of America, Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial.

Reuters reported Monday that major banks and other loan servicers have continued to file questionable documents in foreclosure cases. These include false mortgage assignments, and promissory notes with suspect or missing “endorsements,” which prove ownership. The Reuters report also showed continued “robo-signing,” in which lenders’ employees or outside contractors churn out reams of documents without fully understanding their content. The report turned up several cases involving individuals who were publicly identified as robo-signers months ago.

Reuters found that such activity has continued even after 14 major mortgage lenders signed settlements with federal bank regulators promising to halt such practices and give remediation to some homeowners who were harmed.

Texas Man Buys A $300,000 House For $16

BananaFamine — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:23:45 +0000

Reports KENS5 San Antonio:

Britain’s Assault On Squatters

JacobSloan — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:15:26 +0000

There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties in the UK – 650,000 in England alone. We should be seizing empty properties and giving them to people who need them, not locking up people for wanting a place to live.

People are broke and evicted. Meanwhile, countless homes sit unused and empty, or abandoned…some people take matters into their own hands and live as squatters. But now the outraged authorities are fighting back against the squatter scourge, the UK’s New Left Project writes:

The traditional view that the Tories are the party of the landed classes was built on solid bedrock. The last time they were in power they orchestrated the largest land-grab in living memory – the ‘right to buy’ – through which council housing passed to property magnates and buy-to-let landlords. This time around, spurred on by misleading articles in the right-wing media, they’ve announced plans to make squatting illegal and to allow landlords to forcibly evict people – whether squatters or tenant – backed up by the iron fist of the law. It is a calculated effort to empower those who own more property than they can ever use at the expense of those who have nothing.

Barry Wilton of SQUASH, a campaign group fighting the proposals, believes that the government is trying to pre-empt a wave of squatting brought about by spending cuts and rising unemployment. “They [the government] know that the financial crisis will lead to thousands of ordinary people being evicted for rent arrears or for getting behind with their mortgage,” he says. “With hundreds of thousands of empty properties gathering dust, it’s obvious that many of those people will turn to squatting as a legitimate reaction to a crisis they didn’t cause.”

Given the range of powers available to owner-occupiers and non-residential occupiers, it makes no sense for even the most desperate of squatters to move into a house which is clearly lived in. Instead, squatters are more likely to move into abandoned buildings owned by commercial or absentee landlords. Unlike owner-occupiers, owners of commercial properties can’t force their way back in because Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 makes it an offense for non-residents to use violence to enter a property where someone inside is opposed to their entry.

This law was brought in to give tenants protection from landlords, a fact of which the government is well aware. Crispin Blunt, the Prisons Minister, explained that although Section 6 “was designed to stop unscrupulous landlords from using violence to evict legitimate tenants,” he and his colleagues were considering ways to give “give non-residential property owners the same rights as displaced residential occupiers to break back into their property.” Instead of bringing both parties before a judge, which gives tenants a chance to prove they’ve the right to be there, often-complex housing issues would be dealt with on the doorstep, further inflaming an already heated situation.

Wilton argues that removing these protections will prove impractical. “You can imagine the situation,” he says. “The police turn up at the door and are told that the occupier is a squatter and asked to get them out. They’re expected, with no training, to decide who is right and who is wrong, and to act accordingly.” It’s a recipe for disaster, which may explain why the Police Federation and the Metropolitan Police opposed similar plans in the early 1990s.

It is difficult not to view these proposals as ideologically driven. This is, after all, a government which is relying on stories it knows are bogus to force through changes it accepts will only hurt vulnerable people. There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties in the UK – 650,000 in England alone, according to the Empty Homes Association. Is it really so bad if people put them to more productive use than their owners, especially if they’d otherwise require housing benefit or council housing?

“Ultimately,” says Wilton, “squatters are just stepping in to fill the gap brought about by a failure of both Tory and Labour governments to get to grips with the housing crisis. We should be seizing empty properties and giving them to people who need them, not locking up people for wanting a place to live.” That may be anathema to a party of inherited wealth and property, but it may well be the only equitable solution to this crisis which, we should remember, was caused by the very people that these new laws have been designed protect.

How To Foreclose On A Bank

majestic — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:12:54 +0000

Patrick Rodgers, the Philly Vampire who foreclosed on a Wells Fargo Bank branch, has started a revolution against the banksters, it seems. Ann Carrns reports for the New York Times:

Now, a couple in Naples, Fla., have “foreclosed” on a Bank of America branch after the bank managed to foreclose on their home — even though they never had a mortgage on it. According to reports in The Naples News, Time and elsewhere, Warren Nyerges and his wife paid $165,000 in cash to buy the house from the bank, and never borrowed against it. But last February, in an apparent case of mistaken home identity, the bank began foreclosure proceedings against them.

The couple hired a lawyer and the bank action was eventually abandoned, but the couple then went to court and got a judgment for about $2,500 in attorney’s fees. When the bank didn’t pay, their lawyer, Todd Allen, showed up at a local bank branch last week with sheriff’s deputies and a moving truck to begin cleaning out the building. Not long after, the bank paid them more than $5,700, to cover the fees and additional costs. In a statement to The Naples News, the bank apologized and said the letters had gone to a local lawyer whose office had gone out of business…

[continues in the New York Times]

Asshole Economics 101: Bulldoze Foreclosed Homes, Bulldoze Excess Supply

BananaFamine — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 23:05:11 +0000

Solid proof we’re going to hell in a hand basket. Via CNBC:

Philadelphia Vampire Turns The Foreclosure Tables On Wells Fargo

JacobSloan — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:10:16 +0000

An inspiring story from Philadelphia as a homeowner forecloses on (that’s right, forecloses on) a sleazy big bank. Wells Fargo tried to force Patrick Rodgers into paying for an exorbitant home insurance policy, and then broke the law by ignoring Rodgers’ written requests for a response. After the bank refused to pay resultant fines, a judge ordered a sheriff’s sale on its downtown branch. Oh and also: our hero is A VAMPIRE.

Over One Million People Lost Homes To Foreclosure In 2010

majestic — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:02:45 +0000

Photo: Brendel (CC)

Not only is the housing crisis not over, it looks like it’s accelerating, despite claims in Washington and on Wall Street that a recovery is underway. The only reason the number of foreclosure notices stayed just under 3 million in 2010 was that some banks backed off at the end of the year to avoid bad press. Les Christie reports for CNN Money via Yahoo Finance:

Foreclosures were at a record high in 2010, and more than 1 million people lost their homes, even as notices started leveling off during the end year.

In total, there were nearly 2.9 million foreclosure notices filed during the year, according to report released Thursday by RealtyTrac. That was a record high, but just 1.7% above 2009.

It most certainly would have been higher had notices not plunged in November and December as banks halted tens of thousands of foreclosures in the face of the robo-signing scandal.

“Total properties receiving foreclosure filings would have easily exceeded 3 million in 2010 had it not been for the fourth quarter drop in foreclosure activity,” said James Saccacio, RealtyTrac’s CEO. “Many of the foreclosure proceedings that were stopped in late 2010 — which we estimate may be as high as a quarter million — will likely be re-started and add to [foreclosure] numbers in early 2011.”…

[continues at CNN Money via Yahoo Finance]

Resorting To God To Solve The Housing Crisis

majestic — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:49:04 +0000

As millions of Americans know all too well, no matter what Wall Street says, the housing crisis is far from over. Rather than blame the banks though, the Street’s paper of record, the Wall Street Journal, features a series of photographs of religious and spiritual types trying to “cleanse” foreclosed housing stock of bad vibes. Yeah, that’ll do it guys. I’m not sure if I’m more amused or disgusted. Sample photo below, the rest here.

Lori Bruno, modern day Salem witch. Photo: Christopher Capoziello for the Wall Street Journal.

Banks Accused of Illegally Breaking Into Homes

ralph — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:54:16 +0000

Man, can’t wait for WikiLeaks to release their (alleged) dirt on Bank of America. If that bank does what is reported below, who knows what else the Banksters of America have been involved with. Andrew Martin reports in the NY Times:

TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.

When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.

The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house and thrown out her belongings, without alerting Ms. Ash beforehand.

In an era when millions of homes have received foreclosure notices nationwide, lawsuits detailing bank break-ins like the one at Ms. Ash’s house keep surfacing. And in the wake of the scandal involving shoddy, sometimes illegal paperwork that has buffeted the nation’s biggest banks in recent months, critics say these situations reinforce their claims that the foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed.

Florida’s ‘Rocket Docket’ Courts Help Banks Force Out Homeowners

majestic — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:27:14 +0000

The inimitable Matt Taibbi went down to Florida and found that retired judges are rushing through complex cases to speed foreclosures. Guess who the losers are (Hint: it’s not the banks)? From Rolling Stone:

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and labyrinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

The rocket docket wasn’t created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.

Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren’t exactly public. “The judges might give you a hard time about watching,” one lawyer warned. “They’re not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff.” Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn’t be that bad. It isn’t Indonesia. Right?…

[continues in Rolling Stone]

It’s Dark As A Dungeon Deep Down In The Mine

Danny Schechter — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:17:01 +0000

Report from the Epicenter of Fraudclosures: Can There be A Rescue of US Workers Facing Foreclosure & Unemployment?

WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA: In all of the economic issues we are dealing with, there is always a “back story, a deeper context” that is usually missing, “disappeared” like those Allende supporters in Chile in the 1970s who wanted to empower workers, not just rescue them when they get buried in a deep hole.

Most deeper issues go uncovered. Luis Campos, Director of the School of Anthropology at Chile’s Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, points out, “more buried than the miners themselves, the demands and the rights of the indigenous population continue to be flouted and unrecognized in our country.”

Many unsafe mines worldwide are still at risk from China to Zambia.

Who woulda thunk—certainly not the 1300 “journalists” on the scene–that this mine disaster had its origins in the era when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger helped snuff out an emerging popular democracy in the name of protecting what West Palm Beach-based writer and former economic “hit man,” John Perkins, calls the corporatocracy.

Historian Juan Cole poses these questions:

“Are copper and gold mine owners stronger in relation to workers and have they escaped government regulation because the US engineered a coup in 1973 to destroy the Chilean Left?

“Was the San Estaban mining company’s ability to marginalize the union and to disregard input from the workers rooted in American-imposed corporate privilege? In other words, was the trapping of these workers in the first place Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s fault?”

That deep hole in that Chile mine was caused in part by a gold rush there—triggered, in turn by, a global financial crisis MADE IN THE USA. It had its counterparts in the US and, not just among those 29 miners who perished in the Big Main mine in West Virginia, last April, a disaster that was supposed to lead to new safety rules that the Republicans have been insidiously blocking.

There is another hole we need to focus on. Millions of us are trapped in our own mines, ‘underwater” in homes that have lost value with bills we cannot afford, trapped in unemployment, in jobs that are gone and not coming back. Poverty is up and the noxious Newt Gingrich wants to end the food stamps that so many now depend on.

There is no rescue in sight, and the human plight of most of the millions affected takes part outside of media sight.

The gaggle of reporters that covered the mine rescue as a human-interest story—not a political issue—missed the back-story there, just as they miss our own here.

Far fewer reporters are covering this crisis?

Here in Floriduh, one epicenter of the housing catastrophe, homeowners. were shell-shocked by the latest fraudclosure crime wave. Denise Richardson writes in the Sun Sentinel,

“Last I knew, knowingly signing documents fraudulently and using them in a court of law is frowned on, right? It’s criminal, isn’t it? Or is it only criminal if you are a homeowner and not a bank? Seems we’ve gone to great lengths to create and then accept a double standard here.

Perhaps these financial crimes—yes, that’s what they are, crimes—continue to happen because we never addressed the real problems to begin with. You can’t fix a problem you don’t acknowledge. Does anyone believe that was done to help protect the rights of homeowners? Let’s call it what it is: fraud.”

An attorney in Deerfield Beach Fla., representing 3000 foreclosure victims, has taken hundreds of depositions from Bank employees who admit they knew nothing about the details of the evictions they signed off on. Many are now being put down as “Burger King Kids” yet they know more about real whoppers than this lot knows about real estate. RealtyTrac reports that foreclosure and REO homes accounted for 24 percent of all residential sales during the second quarter? That is huge!

Here in relatively affluent Palm Beach County, homeowners are Number l in the state for the average number of loans in foreclosure that are delinquent. It has the fourth highest number of foreclosures, 45,829 with an average delinquency of 623 days. You will recall that Bernie Madoff once turned Palm Beach into a hunting ground for his ponzi scheme.

This situation is worse than we realize, and not just for the people most directly affected. No one knows how much the banks will lose in the class action suits, fines and legal actions to come. Some think it could be tens of billions suggesting another bailout may be in the offing, probably by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Paul Krugman questions whether the banks had the right to seize many of these homes, arguing, “The mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.”

Buried in the Business section, on page B-8 of the New York Times, way down in an article saying the banks may be on the hook for billions, was this very revealing paragraph speaking to a problem that I have been raising for years making clear the fraud problem is not just with foreclosures.

“Inside the investment houses, several traders said nerves were frazzled further by worries that banks could face much bigger mortgage related losses, not from foreclosures, but because of questions about how the money was lent in the first place. If it turns out that mortgages were bundled together and sold improperly, more holders could sue the banks and force them to buy back tens of billions in mortgage-backed securities.”

Frazzled nerves so far seem the worst punishment the banksters have tasted. They have just decided to reward themselves with a new round of raises and bonuses worth $144 billion with few criticisms. The Government has meanwhile just “settled” for $73 million with Countrywide, the leading predatory lender. That means that a prosecution of its top executives, the poster boys for mortgage criminality, will be dropped. Notes the website Housing Doom:

“Even having to pay $77.5 million, Mozilo still nets $61.5 million, just between November 2006 and October 2007. Maybe “crime doesn’t pay,” but one of the lessons of the housing bust is that fraud does.”

What should be done? Webster Tarpley speaks for many in calling for a national moratorium on foreclosures, a course of action rejected by the White House:

“The current chaos in home foreclosures is once again the direct responsibility of the zombie bankers themselves, who have neglected all traditional legal and accounting standards concerning the necessary paper trails in their frenzied desire to securitize mortgage loans and make them into toxic derivatives in the form of asset-backed securities and mortgage backed securities. The zombie bankers, already the recipients of $24 trillion of public largess in the form of the various bailouts, have turned out to be incompetent even in the technical aspects of their own thieving racket.

But the chaos in the bankers’ filing systems is nothing compared to the chaos created by the millions of foreclosures they have engineered, based on adjustable-rate mortgages and similar misleading contracts which never should have been legal in the first place. For some time, it has been evident that the defense of the American middle class requires a blanket, orderly, federal freeze (or moratorium) on all foreclosures on primary residences, similar to the New Deal protections offered to family farms by the landmark Frazier-Lemke Act of 1935-1949 during the previous depression.”

Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt, goes further in Yes Magazine, asking if it is “Time to Break Up the Too-Big-to-Fail Banks?

“Popular financial analysts, crippling bank losses from foreclosure flaws appear to be imminent and unavoidable. The defects prompting the “RoboSigning Scandal” are not mere technicalities but are inherent to the securitization process. They cannot be cured. This deep-seated fraud is already explicitly outlined in publicly available lawsuits.

There is, however, no need to panic, no need for TARP II, and no need for legislation to further conceal the fraud and push the inevitable failure of the too-big-to-fail banks into the future.”

The faux populists of the Tea Party right have been silent on the issue. Glenn Beck dropped all populist pretensions by calling on followers to give money to the Chamber of Commerce so they can better pursue a corporate agenda. One Republican here assured me that Barney Frank caused the whole financial crisis and that he will be tossed out of office in the midterm election. (He didn’t just blame him—he hates him!) At the same time, one right wing website did publish a detailed denunciation of housing fraud.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/10/14/thedc-op-ed-one-nation-under-fraud/

As depressing as the lack of any real ongoing mass-based populist movement of the left or the right is another reality that the Washington Post finally spills even as millions of Americans buy into the illusion that new politicians can save us while angry voters here in Florida prepare to vote the Tea Party in to office:

“Let us tell you an Ugly Truth about the economy, a truth that no one in power or who aspires to power wants to share with you, at least until after the midterm elections are over. It’s this: There is nothing that the U.S. government or the Federal Reserve or tax cutters can do to make our economic pain vanish overnight.”

So what will it be? More money for the banks to bring them under control, more illegal foreclosures, or some type of justice for homeowners? Will this crisis lead us to demand action to break up these financial behemoths or will we just sit by and watch a new crisis sweep us deeper into our own mines of despair?

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Foreclose This: There’s More Than Robo Signatures To Blame For The Ongoing Foreclosure Scandal

Danny Schechter — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 05:03:49 +0000

The other day, during an interview on Al Jazeera, I was asked if I was frustrated because my warnings and worries about the financial meltdown and foreclosure crisis, first aired in 2006, have been ignored so long.

Duh!

The excruciating lesson I learned is that it takes time for a problem to turn into an issue and, then, an issue to get attention, to move from the business section to the news section, from the back of the paper to page one. It is always hard to predict which story will grab the attention of a news media that has not paid sufficient attention to these issues for years. What connect for editors are usually a small matter and a symbolic one, a story that’s not just new but dripping with the appearance of injustice or hypocrisy?

Once some truth slips through the cracks, a flood threatens like the toxic sludge undoing parts of Hungary.

The fact that millions of Americans were having their homes foreclosed on by a shadowy industry agency using robo signature machines without reviewing the details of the alleged default has become the scandal dujure. Committing this fraud is the Mortgages Electronic Registration System, (MERS) the company the big banks hired to do their dirty work with the appearance of computer-driven semi-official efficiency.

As they churned out and executed foreclosures (while making more than a pretty penny in the process,) they, in effect, executed homeowners with the sanction and support of kangaroo courts. As soon as the Judges received their impeccably prepared documents—like Bernie Madoff’s meticulously written monthly statements fooling his investors—the orders went out to throw the deadbeats out.

One day, and for a quick second, your home sweet homes’ fate is in court before some Judge that has received contributions from the industry, and, the next, the sheriff is outside your door with a goon squad to move your stuff into the street. It has been a cruel, stealth and systematic process.

Explains Naked Capitalism:

“banks have become so powerful in Florida that they have managed to get what amount to kangaroo foreclosure courts created. Not surprisingly, the assembly line imitation of justice railroads borrowers, and prevents legitimate grievances from being heard.

It turns out that banks in that state are so confident of their above the law status that they’ve also taken to casually changing the locks on and entering homes they don’t own, meaning haven’t foreclosed upon. This has become sufficiently common that the local press has taken notice.”

The only problem behind this flim-flam was that this practice violated the law in at least 23 states leading to big banks imposing long overdue foreclosure moratoriums, not to safeguard human rights but to protect their property rights. The banks fear massive and very costly lawsuits. Fortunately, homeowners at risk or in foreclosure could benefit. Some have been fighting back. Watch this

This issue has been all over the media. MERS has been defending itself even as its ship is sinking. Economics writer Yves Smith denounced a statement by its CEO this way, “Wow, this is an almost perfect statement from the Ministry of Truth. Virtually every statement is a lie or very disingenuous. I’m seeing if I can get a lawyer with recognized credentials to shred it.”

The Washington Post reports that the government had been warned repeatedly about problems among mortgage servicers.

The facts here, alas, may not matter as much as an often-omitted fact: the mortgage scandal that triggered the financial crisis goes much deeper than what is happening on the back end, i.e. when a property finally goes into foreclosure.

As Edward Harrison who writes the Credit Writedowns blog, points out,

“The crisis in foreclosure documentation is much deeper than the specific issue of robo-signers which has precipitated the halt in foreclosures by major banks. The fact is the mortgage process in the US is broken because securitization has created a byzantine mess that is wholly unsuited for the large number of foreclosures now on-going.”

And that process has been fudged, riddled with fraud and phony documentation provided by lenders who have been laughing all the way to the bank. There is has been a chain of criminality behind what the FBI has been calling a ‘mortgage fraud epidemic” that has not really been in the news. The press has avoided showing how three industries, real estate, finance and insurance worked together to rip off the American people.

This process has been given political cover, as Mike Taibbi reminds us, that the Tea Party was formed with demagoguery on this very issue (even as many conservatives are also losing their homes):

“This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama’s bailout programs and called for “tea parties” to protest. The impetus for Santelli’s rant wasn’t the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported, …

“No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama’s “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan,” a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis.

“How many of you people want to pay your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand!” Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn’t America reward people who “carry the water instead of drink the water?”

Who is drinking that turgid water now?

Unfortunately, the blame the irresponsible homeowner narrative has become deeply embedded even after films like Leslie Cockburn’s Casino documented the way homeowners in Baltimore were targeted on a racial basis or my own In Debt We Trust and Plunder demonstrating that crimes were committed in a massive way. Michael Moore exposed the ugliness of foreclosures in his Roger and Me and Capitalism: A Love Story.

Now, a new film, Inside Job fleshes out the story with a pretty looking, term paper/power point-style illustrated lecture showing, step by step, how homeowners were fleeced and why the crisis mushroomed. Worth seeing, It’s a bit top-down and dense for my taste with lots of visuals from helicopters over buildings and interviews with big name economists. At the same time, it reveals how former politicians turned academics are serving and servicing the right-wing elite with arguments that conceal their interests and agendas while drawing huge fees for their intellectual subservience/whoredom. It has a studio release so, hopefully, it will be seen widely.

If you like charts that shows how subprime turned subcrime, check this out

The facts are here but the political will isn’t. Where is the solidarity with the victims as the media treats this as a “technical” issue, rarely explaining its premeditated criminal context?

We need the President to proclaim a national moratorium on foreclosures and a no holds barred investigation into these practices that lead to prosecutions. If a French trader who bet wrong can be fined for his billion dollar losses, why not the Wall Street powercrats who sucked away similar sums?

Mostly we need public outrage and popular organizations to force them to do it.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Superman (Comic) Saves Family Home From Foreclosure

ralph — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:58:24 +0000

Damn, why can’t I find one of these laying around? Ray Sanchez reports on ABC News:

A struggling family facing foreclosure has stumbled upon what is considered to be the Holy Grail of comic books in their basement — a fortuitous find that could fetch upwards of a quarter million dollars at auction.

A copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first in which Superman ever appeared, was discovered as they went about the painful task of packing up a home that had been in the family since at least the 1950s. The couple, who live in the South with their children, asked to remain anonymous.

“The bank was about ready to foreclose,” said Vincent Zurzolo, co-owner of ComicConnect.com and Metropolis Comics and Collectibles in New York. “Literally, this family was in tears. The family home was going to be lost and they’re devastated. They can’t figure out a way out of this. They start packing things up. They go into the basement and start sifting through boxes – trying to find packing boxes — and they stumble on eight or nine comic books.”

Most of the comic books in the box were worth between $10 and $30 but one – dated June 1938 and depicting the Man of Steel lifting a car above his head – was extremely rare. That issue, which originally sold for 10 cents, is considered to have ushered in the age of the superhero.

Mortgage Delinquencies, Foreclosures Break Records

majestic — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:56:46 +0000

Photo: Brendel (CC)

Anyone who thinks the financial crisis and recession are over, check this out, from NPR/AP:

The number of homeowners who missed at least one mortgage payment surged to a record in the first quarter of the year, a sign that the foreclosure crisis is far from over.

More than 10 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment in the January-March period, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday. That number was up from 9.5 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and 9.1 percent a year earlier.

Those figures are adjusted for seasonal factors. For example, heating bills and holiday expenses tend to push up mortgage delinquencies near the end of the year. Many of those borrowers become current on their loans again by spring.

Without adjusting for seasonal factors, the delinquency numbers dropped, as they normally do from the winter to spring.

More than 4.6 percent of homeowners were in foreclosure, also a record. But that number, which is not adjusted for seasonal factors, was up only slightly from the end of last year…

[continues at NPR/AP]

The United States of Foreclosures

Danny Schechter — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:29:03 +0000

Foreclosures Are Rising And Not Just Homeowners Are Affected: A Haitian Family Loses Island Home In Earthquake, NY Home in “Bankquake”

The financial crisis started as a housing bubble with the financial industry convinced that home values never fall. How wrong they were even as they leveraged and securitized their investments to create a global crisis.

Now brace yourself, because not only isn’t it over until it’s over, but in some respects it’s only just begun. There will be more foreclosures this year than last and as a result more suffering for American families

Ed Harrison who monitors this industry for a website called Credit Write Downs sees a “second wave coming”—like a new tsunami in a industry that All of Obama’s horses and all of Obama’s men have not been able to do anything about. The idea of challenging fraud and deception with a debt relief plan goes a bit too far for these self-styled centrists. Writes Harrison:

When the crisis first developed, in February of 2007, it was subprime where the worries were, with the lion’s share of write downs coming from mark-to-market losses in the securitization market. However, subprime was a relatively small part of the overall market, making up 14% of loans outstanding at that time. Alt-A loans were 27% and prime loans were 57% respectively of loans outstanding according to a Bank of America Securities report.

As the 2004-2007 cohorts of Alt-A option ARM mortgages have started to reset and prime borrowers have come under stress, we have started to see defaults in markets which are an order of magnitude larger than subprime.

I love phrases like “order of magnitude” because they make problems seem too big to do anything about. As we aggregate the losses we lose sight of the individuals whose lives are at risk even as financial websites carry more and more articles about how to profit from foreclosures.

Today, it’s not just that prime loans are about to go belly up but more and more tenants living in private homes are at risk—with no one looking out for them because they don’t own anything and so are considered disposable.

Mounting foreclosures is an issue I have been writing and railing about. Protests against them are featured in my forthcoming film PLUNDER: The Crime Of Our Time.

There is a macro dimension to this crisis but also a far more personal micro one.

Here’s a story I was told about a middle class woman on Long Island, who happens to be Haitian. I am sure it’s not the worst case—and certainly not the best outcome. Read it and weep—but as you do remember this bell may toll for more of us.

At the same time, as a reporter, I find myself personally exposed to people experiencing these problems. One is a close friend of a close friend who found herself on the street last week.

I offered to help her write an op-ed about her situation based on what she told me. She really liked it, but then had second thoughts about having it appear under her name. It is intimidating if you are not used to challenging powerful institutions even after you have been terribly mistreated. There is always a hope that some deal might save you, or get your home back. I have to respect her right to anonymity, but I can vouch for the accuracy of this sad account implicating a predatory bank and their servicer, the County Sheriff, and a moving company that makes money off of people’s misery.

Here is the account:

MY HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE (BANKQUAKE?) IN NASSAU COUNTY

Almost two months ago, the country I was born in suffered a natural calamity. Hundreds of thousands died in the Haitian earthquake, members of my own family among them. Our family home was destroyed. It was heartbreaking and traumatizing. I am still grieving. I was happy to know that so many people who live here on the Island responded with an outpouring of donations and concern. No homeowner would ever want to share the same experience of sudden forced homelessness.

Less than a week ago, I stood outside a home that I have lived in for 14 years and watched the Nassau County Sheriff’s office and a team of movers (from Network Moving & Trucking )that they hired, evict me, crudely packing up all my possessions, throwing precious belongings in boxes and somehow also stealing my grand daughter’s laptop in the process before physically pushing her into the street.

My family had just been dispossessed in Haiti, and now I was having a similar (but far less deadly) experience in Nassau County. Only this calamity was not due to a natural disaster, but to a well-proven chain of fraud and abuse by banks. The FBI has confirmed we have been living through a “fraud epidemic” since 2004.

No big name musicians are raising money for the victims of this disaster. So far, the government agencies that have promised to curb an out of control foreclosure crisis have been ineffectual. The big banks have paid lip service to helping their customers, but, as study after study documented, they make more money throwing people out of their homes and reselling them than modifying mortgages so residents can stay where they are. They are in the game for profits, not to help people.

In my case, I persistently reached out to the bank with emails and calls to try to negotiate. No one would take my calls or respond. There was no there there. I have been experiencing disdain and insensitivity at every turn.

I reached out to legal agencies which Nassau County itself advises people facing eviction to go to. What happened? They told me there was nothing they could do.

In my case, I wanted to buy the house I lived in with my grandchild—I am nearly 65—but the mortgage broker and the REMAC realty agency and the courts were less than helpful. No one would assist me. The Administration has stopped deportation orders for Haitians convicted of crimes, but seems uninterested in helping law abiding people like myself.

Was it my accent, my Haitian background? I am an American citizen and a former civil servant with a long history of public service and employment. Ethnicity may be a factor but they treat people of all races this way–with contempt!

Compounding the problem for me is that I wasn’t even the homeowner but a tenant whose landlord had disappeared leaving the home with all sorts of major structural problems and unpaid bills. I tried reaching him and the bank for months on end with no success.

The bank in this case was HSBC, one of the most notorious subprime lenders, which has written off billions of dollars because of its irresponsible lending policies, and been subject to investigations and reprimand. Their servicer is part of the scheme. It is no wonder that the public calls these people banksters. That is who they are.

I went to Court and had my appeal to stay the eviction denied without any reasons given. The Sheriff told me the eviction could be stopped if I applied for bankruptcy. I did so, and when I tried to call him with the file number, as instructed, before his office carried out the eviction, no one would take my call. His secretary told he would not talk to me. A bankruptcy filing should have stopped the eviction. It didn’t. These are the bureaucratic games they play with people’s lives.

And then to add insult to injury, the moving company had the nerve to yell at me for trying to stop my own eviction claiming that I was trying to cheat them out a $2000 fee for doing the job during which my grandchild was pushed physically and “lost” her computer.

I am appealing to my Nassau neighbors to express concern about this outrage like they did for the victims of the quake.

Please help me call for an investigation and reversal of this rushed eviction without a fair hearing or recourse. Will someone look into the actions by the Sheriff of Nassau County who did the bank’s bidding, and Judge Scott Fairgrieve who callously signed the order without an ounce of compassion.

I am now, as a senor citizen homeless and personally at risk. I fainted on the day of the eviction and had to be hospitalized. I don’t know what will happen to me, and if something does, what will happen to my grandchild? For me, this calamity was like an earthquake destroying my life. Call ita bak quake if you will. I need help now.

Will someone stand up for me as I have for years for people all over the world?

If you live on Long Island and can help, write to me and I will pass on your message. Please circulate this appeal.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and directed the forthcoming film PLUNDER: The Crime Of Our Time.

“Take ‘Er Down”: The American Dream Turned Nightmare

disinfogreg — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:13:17 +0000

Not sure how I feel about this very American expression of homeowner rage:

from death+taxes

It’s undeniable that the recession has unleashed anger across the nation. And that anger’s rapidly devolving into madness. From Joe Stack’s flight into an IRS building to Terry Hoskins, the man who bulldozed his house ahead of foreclosure, seemingly average Americans are lashing out in crazy ways. While Stack’s attack qualifies as the most dramatic outburst, the Hoskins incident, hardly isolated, provides a far more telling glimpse into the ways the economic crisis has soured, and scorched, the American dream.

Owning a home once ranked as the primary goal in the American experience. It was the pinnacle of national striving and homes were icons. Now, as millions face foreclosure, that dream has turned into a nightmare. At his wit’s end about a potential foreclosure, and undoubtedly angry with the bank, Ohio man Terry Hoskins decided to take matters into his own hands and destroy his home. “When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it — no, I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I took it down,” explained Hoskins. It’s a compelling tale, one that gives a face to universal public frustration. It’s also turned Hoskins into something of a hero.

Scores of people are praising Hoskins’ middle finger to big business. That’s not surprising. It was, after all, a somewhat charming way to get back at the bank. Rush Limbaugh called his and Stack’s actions “defiance.” Neighbors and sympathizers have started a website to collect donations for Hoskins, who still owes the bank and IRS hundreds of thousands, and may lose his business. Local businesses are showing their support by selling t-shirts and hats that depict a bulldozer and read “Take ‘Er Down.” It’s unclear if “‘er” means the banks, the government, or just foreclosed homes. A sympathetic singer, meanwhile, has written a ballad about Hoskins.

It doesn’t matter to many that Hoskins insists he didn’t do it to “stick it to the man.” He unwittingly embodies public anger, and the public likes to see a mirror image. Though Hoskins gained widespread exposure for his antics, he’s hardly the only American taking drastic steps to avoid foreclosure. He’s just the most flamboyant and, therefore, spellbinding.

The Great Foreclosure Robbery Of The 21st Century

Robert Singer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:23:38 +0000

By Robert Singer

The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that there have now been 1,000,000 foreclosures filed so far in 2009 and the group expects the foreclosure number to double before the end of the year.

U.S. Home Vacancies Hit 18.7 Million on Bank Seizures (Update2) [1]

Thanks to our controlled and uncontrolled media, we know when you take the derivative of the foreclosure crisis you get those greedy predatory lenders at AIG, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America plotting to steal our tacky (I mean tract-y) houses.

Conventional wisdumb and the media always blame the usual suspects and FOX News wraps it up: “It’s the age-old Wall Street vs. Main Street smackdown again”

Is this foreclosure for profit?

Read the rest at the Marketoracle

The Great U.S. Housing Market Foreclosure Robbery Of The 21st Century