As the foreclosure scandal has unfolded, the pretzel dance of explanations by the banking industry would be almost hilarious were the potential damage to rank-and-file Americans not so disastrous. Just worth a tongue-click and a head-shake if this were an anomaly rather than yet another in a series of multi-hundreds-of-billions of dollars of dodgy and outright fraudulent banker dealings. The rip-offs have contributed mightily to the economic mess we're in today, a mess in which the gain of a few thousand new jobs a month is considered a victory. Our economic situation is not just the consequence of the worst recession since the 1930s, but rather of decades of regulatory failure and policy initiatives that seem designed to let the crooks get away with it. Fraudclosure is just the latest eruption.
"No big deal" would probably be their claim had not bank PR departments been trained to deliver sophisticated obfuscations like problem foreclosures are due to technicalities, and there aren't even very many of them. Another hint of how very much a big deal this is - amid a plethora of such hints over the past few weeks - can be found in Sunday's New York Daily News under the byline of Robert Gearty:
Thousands of foreclosures across the city are in question because paperwork used to justify the seizure of homes is riddled with flaws, a Daily News probe has found.
Banks have suspended some 4,450 foreclosures in all five boroughs because of paperwork problems like missing and inaccurate documents, dubious signatures and banks trying to foreclose on mortgages they don't even own. ...
Some banks also pursue foreclosures even after delinquent homeowners have sold the houses and paid off the mortgages. |
Yves Smith comments:
The population of the US is roughly 308 million. If the rate of problems with foreclosures in the US is the same as in New York, that suggest that 163,000 foreclosures underway NOW have significant documentation problems, and some of them indicated in the article (foreclosing on people who have discharged the mortgage, lack of clear ownership of the note) are not mere “paperwork” problems, but point to more serious failings.
Note also that at least some judges are not persuaded by the banks’ breezy assurances that all is now well.
Keep in mind that this quick calculation applies to foreclosures now underway. The cumulative number is clearly vastly greater. |
Vastly greater. How big a deal is that?
• • • • •
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
You heard the story -- it was all over the right-wing blogs. Some poor white girl, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of Texas, was mugged at an ATM, but when the mugger (a big black guy) saw her car with the McCain sticker, he beat her and carved a letter "B" in her face with a knife. Apparently it was a dyslexic mugger because the "B" was carved backward, but whatever -- it proved that Obama's supporters were violent and craaazy! ...
The story was instantly suspect, as the pictures of her supposed beating, her Twitter account, and her timelines all patently contradicted themselves. But the wingnutosphere, with the healthy assist from Fox News, piled on anyway, letting their ideological blinders get in the way of reality. As usual.
And now they look like idiots. As usual.
As for Ms. Ashley Todd, being a liar and race-baiter is par for the course for College Republicans. |