At The Intercept, David Dayen writes that the same foreclosure fraud that was a lynchpin of bank behavior leading up to the Great Recession continues to happen even now.
My new book, Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, is about three foreclosure victims who ended up doing more investigation of the corrupt U.S. mortgage industry than any state or federal law enforcement or regulatory official. [...]
It’s a work of history, depicting events that occurred from 2009 to 2012. But it’s a living history, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. [...]
When the Justice Department and state attorneys general finished their press conferences lauding big headline settlement penalties (numbers that shrink upon inspection), they neglected the ongoing chaos in our courts. People have been tied up in foreclosure nightmares for nearly a decade, with the same kinds of false documents used to grease the evictions.
It’s virtually impossible for a foreclosure case on a securitized subprime loan from the housing bubble era to NOT involve false documents.
The government, the regulators, and the judges seem content to refer back to their press releases about what they delivered for homeowners, while willfully blinding themselves to the continuing destruction of the integrity of the nation’s judicial system. They’ve collectively decided to pretend that the ruination of a 300-year-old property records system never happened. And homeowners are left to pick through the rubble on their own.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—War is a force that gives us meaning:
Chris Hedges new book, War is a force that gives us meaning, is not a memoir, but a remembrance of his years as a war correspondent. There are no great confessions or revelations, but an honest exploration of what war brings to us.
In the wake of 9/11, his book is especially powerful, since he shows how the state becomes the religion of the people in wartime, how nationalism subverts honesty and common sense.
Our inability to respond to Al Qaeda in a meaningful way comes from this impulse to bolster the state in time of war, to embrace the myths of heroic violence. A myth slowly and surely coming undone in Iraq. Heroism, embraced on the thinest of pretexts, is now being revealed as sham and artifice.
War is an odd and cruel beast. It changes everything around you even if you don't notice it. We now chase our tails trying to trap Saddam, hunt him down and contain him, while his myth only grows stronger. The Saudis are not going to track down Al Qaeda any more than you're going to build a cathedral in Medina. It's no contest. The odds are high, if you asked, the most popular Saudi in Saudi Arabia is Osama, not the king or his sons. Too much would be revealed by an honest accounting of AQ and the Saudi government.
Hedges talks of how everything is perverted in war, but the one thing he didn't mention was the encouragement of illusions. […]
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, more first-hand accounts coming out of the Nevada convention raise still more issues. Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter join in the discussion. Plus an update on the courts, Zika, the budget and other things the Congress is supposed to be dealing with, but isn’t.
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