It's snowing - seriously, I'm in New Jersey it's October 29th and it's friggin' snowing (on a Saturday). So I was already not in the mood to see yet another instance of the predatory 1% attacking the bottom 99.
It's bad enough the Top 1% lie, cheat, steal, start fictitious wars and have loan sharked most of the country into debt slavery - now they engage in open mockery of the people they victimize through their ill deeds.
(Two Steven J. Baum employees mocking homeowners who have been foreclosed on)
From the New York Times:
On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, 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.
Shame shame shame. This firm is part of the fraudclosure process - so not only are they evicting people from their homes, which by the way assholes is a tragedy for the families it happens to, they are part of a group that is evicting people fraudulently from their homes.
There's more after the jump, try not to vomit.
You might not be surprised that such a group of scumbags have had legal problems, from the same NYT article:
These pictures are hardly the first piece of evidence that the Baum firm treats homeowners shabbily — or that it uses dubious legal practices to do so. It is under investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. It recently agreed to pay $2 million to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York.” (In the press release announcing the settlement, Baum acknowledged only that “it occasionally made inadvertent errors.”)
Let's be clear when you are a money-grubbing piece of dirt firm that makes a living chiseling and conning people, you don't pay $2 million because you like giving money away. Guilty.
The tale of woe continues:
MFY Legal Services, which defends homeowners, and Harwood Feffer, a large class-action firm, have filed a class-action suit claiming that Steven J. Baum has consistently failed to file certain papers that are necessary to allow for a state-mandated settlement conference that can lead to a modification. Judge Arthur Schack of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn once described Baum’s foreclosure filings as “operating in a parallel mortgage universe, unrelated to the real universe.”
It's not unrelated to the real universe, you just have to understand the 1% and their (all too willing) executioners like Baum are above the law:
Make no mistake the 1% have gotten away with murder in this country, so much so they think it's funny to mock their victims:
(A corner of the Baum office was decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes.)
(O.T.S.C. stands for order to show cause, a last-ditch motion often made by desperate homeowners about to be evicted from their homes.)
(A "squatter" in Baum Estates.)
This reminds me of that famous scene in Goodfellas when the Banksters Gangtsers all show up to the Christmas party broadcasting their big heist with new cars and fur coats. DeNiro's character, Jimmy Conway, flips out amazed that after breaking the law so flagrantly the gangsters would be stupid enough to be so obvious about their ill deeds.
Maybe next Halloween the gangsters at the law firm of Steven J. Baum can dress up like characters from Goodfellas, then again that wouldn't require costumes.
I guess to the Top 1% the bottom 99% are clowns.
Clearly, we're here to amuse them.