The Great Foreclosure Robbery

The Great Foreclosure Robbery

(excerpt from, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto”, by Paul. J. Bern)

Grand larceny is currently being committed by Wall Street “banksters” and by certain crooked real estate and mortgage brokers concerning America's housing crisis. The retirement savings and the equity of all the family/private housing of the middle and working classes have been severely compromised or even liquidated altogether by the crooked and devious manipulations of Wall Street bankers, market speculators, hedge fund managers and corporate boards of directors who engineered the largest swindle in human history back in 2008, and who have turned Wall Street and the US real estate market into a gambling casino. This is all part of the ongoing pattern of what amounts to the forcible confiscation of wealth from the US middle and working classes – indeed from 99%+ of the population – by the remaining tiny majority of wealthy, powerful and well-connected financial elite. As I described in a previous posting, middle class wealth is being forcibly transferred via a rigged economic and political system in four different ways. Last week I outlined the first method, which has been the confiscation of middle class incomes through the mass outsourcing of the best US jobs overseas while cutting wages and benefits on the ones who remain, leaving all the rest of us out in the cold. This week I will write about the second method, and let me first say that based on the considerable amount of research I did prior to writing my first book, I came to the conclusion early on that an enormous crime had been committed and that millions of former homeowners had been deliberately swindled, with one family out of every five becoming homeless as a result. And that is a civil rights violation, a transgression of basic human rights, and a national outrage if ever there was one.

The great financial meltdown of 2008 hit the US economy like a supersonic shock wave rocketing over the financial horizon. What has followed has been the largest confiscation of wealth in human history. Many millions – not thousands but millions – of homes that were occupied by working Americans have been foreclosed on, with the end result being an equal number of millions of families and individuals being forced out of their homes that they had been making payments on for years, and sometimes for decades. This has had three different outcomes for those unlucky persons who have been evicted from their residences. The most fortunate ones have bought cheaper houses, or they have rented houses or apartments if they could not qualify for another home purchase. The less fortunate people have either rented rooms in their houses to help make ends meet, or they have moved in with parents, friends or other relatives and begun sharing living quarters. The least fortunate ones have wound up homeless, living in their cars – if they are lucky enough to still have cars – in tents or in homeless shelters and even abandoned houses. 

 

The worst part is that untold thousands of well-educated and gainfully employed persons who were formerly in homes of their own have ended up living on the street with no relief in sight. This is not just an economic or social issue, this is a civil rights issue. Having a roof over your head is not a luxury, it is a fundamental human right. Even the cave men lived in caves. They had shelter even though they didn't have jobs or any form of an economic system in place. America has the power and the means to end homelessness forever, but our country's “leaders” are spending the money on pointless foreign wars instead. Home ownership is similarly a fundamental human right rather than a dwelling that goes to the highest bidder. To have this many people who are willing and able to work living in the streets, in shelters, in their cars or tents, or with friends or relatives is a national disgrace and a cause for mass civil unrest and political instability all across America. It makes me wonder why there aren't more people protesting in the streets, occupying government buildings and TV and radio stations. However, I am confidant that this will soon change. Occupy America, anyone?

There are two primary causes of the ongoing foreclosure crisis as far as I can tell. The first cause is incompetence, as the following headline from my research says: “Trillions in Loans in Doubt Due to Paperwork Snafus”. It is a documented fact that the majority of lending institutions' foreclosures are bogus. The reason is that these institutions can't prove they own the properties on which they are foreclosing. For more details, you'll have to buy the book. The second cause of the ongoing foreclosure crisis is outright fraud. The current wave of foreclosures – expected to reach 13 million by the end of 2012 – is not good for anyone. It is a recipe for financial disaster. OK, so let me summarize what is happening to middle America.

• Banks continue to steal homes to which they have no legal claim. The banks have no legal standing to foreclose because they lack the most basic of necessary documentation for the foreclosure to be legal. It does not matter how many payments a debtor has missed; if the bank trying to foreclose cannot produce the note then there is no right to foreclose.
• The current wave of foreclosures is expected to reach 13 million by 2012, and the modern mortgage system was designed to generate a tsunami of defaults. The hope was that virtually all mortgages would go bad, so that the property could be seized and transferred to our true propertied class of rightful owners – those north of the 99th percentile – while leaving the dispossessed homeowners in permanent debt.
• Courts across the country are waking up to the foreclosure scams; in many cases, homeowners did not miss payments – rather, the mortgage service companies lost them or intentionally neglected to post them. The idea was that you would take people who do not qualify for conventional mortgages, sell them houses they cannot afford, give them the worst possible terms you can sucker them into, create an expensive home finance food chain that rewards every link with high fees, pay top management millions in bonuses, and then foreclose and resell the property to reboot the whole process all over again.
• The Wall Street blood sucking vampires are supposed to, somehow, profit on this business model, but it only happens through fraud – layer upon layer of fraud. The blood suckers thought they'd cook the books, get their bonuses, flaunt the laws, buy the foreclosed properties in fire sales, and emerge as the winners of the new Ownership Society. In the process, they destroyed the economy and the institution of private property in the United States. It is now up to the American people to rebuild it.

All the above are examples of capitalism running out of control. Capitalism used to be a tool by which regular working folks like ourselves can improve their lot in life by building wealth through home ownership. Instead, here in the early 21^st century capitalism is being used against the middle and working classes like a weapon wielded by the rich, powerful and politically well connected – in other words by the top economic 1% of the US population – for the sole express purpose of the systematic confiscation of middle class wealth. They are also examples of class warfare being waged all across America in the form of confiscation of property. All of this activity by the governmental and financial sectors amounts to civil war. Unfortunately for the rich, the wealthy are vastly outnumbered by the working class here in America, and it is by our superior numbers that we will soon defeat them. Over 95 percent of troubled mortgages in the United States are owned by five main institutions: J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and HSBC. They have this country collectively held by the neck. If anyone reading this has accounts with any of these banks, you can protest their mortgage larceny by moving your funds to a credit union or other nonprofit financial entity.

The fact of the matter is that if we working Americans don't start fighting back, we will wind up being financially and politically obliterated. What will happen if we don't fight back? Let me assure you that the federal government, backed up by Wall Street and the banking industry combined with the Federal Reserve and the US Department of the Treasury, has already made plans for just such a scenario as that. They are counting on people who don't care to fight back because they don't think they can win, or because they are “law-abiding citizens” who don't want to cause any trouble or who are too intimidated to risk getting in trouble with the authorities. I forcefully submit and strongly argue that if something isn't done to stop this madness there will be no more middle class in the United States by the end of this decade. It is time to replace bought-and-paid-for corporate plutocracy with the only authority that matters – that of the American people. Does anybody here want to fade into oblivion by 2020? I sure as hell don't, so what are we waiting for? The time to begin to stand up to these Goliaths at the US capitol and on Wall Street is now. Take back your country!