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A man who paid for his house with cash was foreclosed by Bank
of America for not having a mortgage. A woman called 911 when
JPMorganChase tried to break into her home to change the locks. She
was behind on her mortgage, but the foreclosure process hadn’t begun.
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Bank of America entered a woman’s home, changed the locks, cut
off the utilities and seized her pet parrot—even though she had not
missed any mortgage payments. A homeowner sued Bank of America for
seizing his home even though he owned it outright. The bank cut the
power, leaving 75 pounds of salmon to rot in his freezer.
There’s definitely something fishy about this whole foreclosure
business. But The New York Times’s what-me-worry kid, Eric Dash,
doesn’t smell anything rottin’. His bottom line: “Oh, get over it, it’s
just a few missing signatures, and the whiners are deadbeats!”
Says Dash: “Revelations that the nation’s biggest banks may
have fudged crucial documents in their rush to reclaim tens of
thousands of homes have the public in an uproar. Attorneys general from
all 50 states announced sweeping investigations.”
He admitted that the banks’ brief foreclosure suspension was
“something of a public relations game.” But anyway, “their internal
reviews suggested that the problems were not as deep as they feared,
giving them the confidence to resume evictions.” And why should we
doubt their word, right?
Dash admits banks “allowed a single employee to sign off on
thousands of documents attesting to information he or she did not know
to be true,” i.e., “robo-signing.”
And forgetting the cardinal rule of computing—Garbage In,
Garbage Out—Dash blames the banks’ electronic mortgage filing system.
He conveniently doesn’t mention that this system was used above all so
mortgages could be packaged in speculative securities—for which we paid
trillions already through the Obama bailout, and are now going to pay
for yet again.
In reply to the question, “Who is the victim here?” Dash
replies: “There are few reports that banks have mistakenly foreclosed
on a homeowner. In many of these cases, borrowers are more than a year
behind on their payments, and do not currently live in the home.”
What’s worse, in the eyes of Dash and business columnists, is
that the deadbeats are endangering the economy by stalling their
evictions! “An industrywide moratorium, or lengthy delays, could
seriously hamper a recovery of the housing market. … Homes that sit in
foreclosure, especially vacant ones, can depress property values and
consumer confidence.”
That, in turn, could ripple through the economy. “Banks might
pull back sharply on lending, triggering a repeat of the credit crunch.
… That is why the Obama administration wants the foreclosure system back
on track—and to stamp out calls for a national freeze.” Sod the
paperwork, let’s get evictions rolling again!
One real estate lawyer explained to The Times how the
banks intend to fix their paperwork “lapses”: “You can go to the judge
in the foreclosure action and say: ‘I think I bought this loan but
there is one thing missing … you should overlook this gap because I am
the rightful owner.’” “I think I bought it,” he says they should
plead! Imagine an evictee using such an argument!
An even larger threat to the economy looms because of the fight
between the banks and the investors who bought their mortgage-backed
securities, now revealed to be based on fraudulent or at least
inadequately documented titles. Regardless of who wins this battle, you
know who’ll pick up the tab. And the fallout from this battle in
financial markets could easily deepen the continuing global depression.
The solution, once again, is to make those who caused the
crisis pay for it—including by measures that would expose the systemic
nature of the crisis. That’s the approach taken by the Take Back the
Land Movement, a national coalition, which noted that “foreclosure
fraud … is but a symptom of a deeper structural crisis. They put
forward a set of what they call “transitional demands,” which “can
potentially heighten the overall contradictions within the system of
capitalist exploitation and appropriation”:
• Government take over and administration of loan modification
programs, taking the banks out of the process.
• Restitution for foreclosure fraud victims.
• Use this crisis to convert residences to cooperative housing
units directly governed and administered by the impacted families and
communities.
To win these demands, they call for “concerted direct action of
those most affected and those in solidarity”:
• Nationally coordinated days of action against banks and
government agencies.
• A nationally coordinated rent strike of those facing
foreclosure and eviction.
• Community occupations of vacant properties and land to
transform them into cooperative housing.
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