Once again, as another harebrained scheme unravels, the swinging dicks of Wall Street manage to appear impervious to reality and completely immune to the truth.
Nearly every Attorney General in the country is now investigating what was not just simply serial fraud but a no-holds-barred crime spree affecting millions of mortgages across the country.
If you want to see an excellent explanation of the foreclosure fraud, check out the in-depth post, "Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies" by Michael Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
The Wall Street frat boys, in a propaganda blitz that would make Tokyo Rose and Joseph Goebbels envious, have come out in droves to blame the victims.
In a piece from the New York Observer, one guy who was most likely too gutless to be identified by name is described only as a man wearing a bespoke blue-striped shirt, a Hermés tie patterned with elephants and Ferragamo loafers said, "You had people putting zero down to get massive houses they couldn't afford to be in, but now they want to stay. And the government wants to let them stay, because they're voters."
One example of these massive houses is the house in Maine that started the robo-signer investigations. Nicolle Bradbury bought her house seven years ago for a whopping $75,000. "A major step up from the trailer she had been living in with her family", the New York Times reported.
Propaganda isn't new to the Masters of the Universe. It started with the dream of homeownership and cheap loans. Alan Greenspan perpetuated the attitude by suggesting that people use their homes as ATM machines and praised the use of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARM). Wall Street ran with that and pushed ARMs at an alarming rate. At the height of the boom, during the four to five year period before the financial meltdown it was virtually impossible to get a conventional 30 year mortgage. When the financial crisis hit, banks quickly went into action and blamed the entire fiasco on subprime borrowers.
"If it weren't for the banks pushing these risky mortgages on brokers and agents with massive incentives, no one would have bought them. But when it's the only thing you can buy and you're looking at skyrocketing home values being artificially inflated, what choice do you have," said Steve Dibert a loan fraud investigator at MFI-Miami.
Bankers, of course, see it the other way around and prefer to blame homeowners -- who had nothing to do with creating, what bankers refer to as "complex financial instruments" when asked to explain credit default swaps, securitized loans, and derivatives as if the rest of us are too stupid to understand.
Citi chairman Richard D. Parsons told the Observer this summer in an interview, "The loans wouldn't have been there in the first place if American home buyers, driven by what The Weekly Standard calls immediate gratification without personal responsibility, hadn't overstepped their bounds."
Stories like Bradbury's are the majority. As opposed to the occasional ridiculous story of the cab driver with eight homes and the 14-year-old who bought a McMansion with paper route money, which the banks would like us to believe are the cause of the meltdown.
The majority are hardworking, honest people who simply want to stop being screwed at every turn. One homeowner who contacted me through ShameTheBanks.org had this to say:
For the past three years, my life has been on hold. All of my income goes right back to fix my mistakes. I don't have enough to eat but don't qualify for food stamps because I make too much money. I don't get free legal assistance to fight foreclosure because I make too much money. No help paying for my medicine because I have health insurance and make too much money.
I work two jobs and burn the candle at both ends. I sold almost everything I have, which is fine; probably shouldn't have it in the first place. Now I have two things left - my art house/foreign film movie collection and my childhood Lego sets that I wanted to give to my children someday. I shouldn't have to be making that choice. Not this close to the finish line.Follow the money. I pay taxes. TARP gives that tax money to the banks. Some of it comes back to me to get me over the hump. I continue to pay taxes and my creditors. Everyone wins.
Banks do not just walk away from a cash cow like "mortgage servicing" without a good reason. Mortgage servicing is a $200 billion a year business and that is not because of the flat 0.25% fee mortgage servicers receive to process the timely payments of responsible homeowners. In the boom years, mortgage servicers raked in fees every time they convinced a homeowner to refinance--the more "adjustable" the better!--and in the bust years, late fees and foreclosures are the cash cows. Like all things banks do, it is truly recession-proof! The catch is that because foreclosures sort of necessarily involve, you know, "laws" governing "property rights" and "trespassing" and whatever, they require someone acting on behalf of the theoretical new "owner" of the property (whoever that is) to sign an affidavit saying something along the lines of, "yes, I've thought about it and reviewed the documents and whoever the local sheriff is should know that definitely these people deserve to have their locks abruptly changed and all their shit ransacked by some contract team of meatheads, and whoever shows up on this property after that they should feel free to harass, arrest, and what the hell waterboard.
The latest development, uncovered by Huffington Post Investigative Fund, is about banks now collecting taxes. According to the article:
In many cases, the banks and hedge funds created new companies to do their bidding. They gave the companies obscure, even whimsical names and used post office boxes as their addresses, masking Wall Street's dominant new role as a surrogate tax collector.
In exchange for paying overdue real estate taxes, the investors gain legal powers from local governments to collect the debt and levy fees. At first, property owners may owe little more than a few hundred dollars, only to find their bills soaring into the thousands. In some jurisdictions, the new Wall Street tax collectors also chase debtors over other small bills, such as for water, sewer and sidewalk repair.
Pretty convenient arrangement considering they also collect those taxes in the form of escrow payments from borrowers. I have heard and read hundreds of stories from homeowners who have paid their taxes and insurance through escrow payments with their mortgage only to find that the servicer didn't actually pass those payments along to tax offices and insurance companies. Now the homeowner is behind on their taxes and the insurance has been canceled for non-payment. So, one department collects the escrow payments that should be going towards taxes, but doesn't pay it, then another department takes over the collection of taxes and fines the homeowner - who has been paying all along. In many cases the the servicer don't apply these payments to anything. They simply pocket the money, much in the same way they pocket trial modification payments.
By blaming homeowners, bankers are trying to harness the anger of ordinary people -- who are angered by the economic disaster that Wall Street itself created -- and give ordinary people a reason to turn on each other.
In a pervasive culture of greed, like the one that exists on Wall Street, the lack of ethics and compassion has permeated every corner of the industry. It has become more important for banks to simply make money at any cost than it has to take part and play a role in a flourishing and successful economy, as they are designed and expected to do. That being said, it almost makes sense that they would vilify the very people who they bilked, conned, and stole from, now that the jig is up.
In her book" Bird by Bird", Anne Lamott tells the story of a conversation with her pastor. In it she questions why she doesn't have an abundance of money. The pastor says to her, "If you really want to see what God thinks about money, just look at who he gives it to."
Remember: You can post your own mortgage horror story at www.ShametheBanks.org
Follow Richard Zombeck on Twitter: www.twitter.com/zombeck
A Washington Post article from the other day told the story of Joshua Bartlett, of Ft Myers, FL, who purchased a house for $158,000, refinanced it a few years later for $210,000 [from a PBS piece on the same guy in April 2010], and then stopped paying rent.
He now claims that his mortgage "isn't fair", even though he is employed, and could afford to make his payments.
The banks don't seem to care, but I suppose that it’s ultimately Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (AKA taxpayers) who will pay the cost of this. Maybe we should at least charge people rent to stay in their pre-foreclosure home.
The real problem with bailouts is that you're using money from other taxpayers, who can't afford to bail them out. They've got problems of their own.
I told the truth immediately and loudly. Jack called me a couple times, each time imploring me to say that I did, indeed, make what he put on the app, or that I had a saving account with a certain amount in it. I told him no way and called Kerry Killinger's office in Seattle to complain.
You bank apologists - stick it. The banks failed in their fiduciary duty to their investors. No one was holding a gun to some poor lil ole banker's head to create these toxic loans. Read this deposition about the David J. Stern law office: photoshopped signatures, phony docs created behind closed doors, employees coached in the fine art of forgery, backdated documents...
http://4closurefraud.org/2010/10/18/another-4closurefraud-bombshell-full-deposition-of-kelly-scott-of-the-law-office-of-david-j-stern/
The banks are going down.
And there are several economies that the common american individual has no idea exist.
There are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes in commerce, and so, if its not disclosed properly, that would be grounds to have each and every contract voided.
I just dont get all the hullabaloo... ITS NOT AS SIMPLE AS "PAYING YOUR BILLS"!!!
Wed Aug. 4, 2010
"...Now they were up against one of Florida's biggest foreclosure law firms: Founded by multimillionaire attorney David J. Stern, it controlled one-fifth of the state's booming market in foreclosure-related services."
"While the mortgage fiasco has so far cost American homeowners an estimated $7 trillion in lost equity, it has made Stern (no relation to NBA commissioner David J. Stern) fabulously rich. His $15 million, 16,000-square-foot mansion occupies a corner lot in a private island community on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. It is featured on a water-taxi tour of the area's grandest estates, along with the abodes of Jay Leno and billionaire Blockbuster founder Wayne Huizenga, as well as the former residence of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. (Last year, Stern snapped up his next-door neighbor's property for $8 million and tore down the house to make way for a tennis court.) Docked outside is Misunderstood, Stern's 130-foot, jet-propelled Mangusta yacht—a $20 million-plus replacement for his previous 108-foot Mangusta. He also owns four Ferraris, four Porsches, two Mercedes-Benzes, and a Bugatti—with models costing north of $1 million.."
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/david-stern-djsp-foreclosure-fannie-freddie
$6 million beachfront condominium in the city, $6 million home in nearby Hillsboro Beach
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-19/florida-attorney-buys-bugatti-yacht-mansion-with-his-foreclosure-fortune.html
geithner and goldman need to be INVESTIGATED, PROSECUTED, and CLAWED BACK for financial terrorism along with blankfein, fuld, rubin, summers, bernanke, greenspam, dimon, speyer, stephen friedman, prince, weill, immelt, chais, merkin, picower... They all KNEW the public would forget their crimes due to the sunami of cascading information that no common person can process...
after all they finance the major media outlets.
most are NY Fed alumni.
their unmitigated GREED destroyed middle class mortgages, 401Ks, health care, schools, and the middle class.
This was the greatest REDISTRIBUTION of wealth in history; UPWARD to the wealthiest few.
by appointing geither, summers, having rubin in a key advisory role, minions of goldman sachs throughout his administration, and reconfirming bernanke, Obama is complicit and has facilitated this pillaging of America.
if he is to be remembered as anything other than a wall street facilitator, if he is to live up to his campaign rhetoric, he has to make Major, Bold, Progressive changes that CLAMP DOWN on wall street, private equity, hedge funds, and invest in the middle class!