Joe Stringer of ACCE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment talks about why he is going to Washington, DC to risk arrest at the Department of Justice.

Stringer,in Los Angeles talks about how the foreclosure crisis has decimated his neighborhood in Watts.

It's time for bankers to go to jail!

This may be President Obama's last chance to get justice for the millions of homeowners, taxpayers, and retirees whose homes, savings, pensions and livelihoods were stolen by Wall Street bankers.

Tell President Obama:

1. Prosecute Wall Street bankers for stealing our homes, savings and livelihoods.

2. Keep people in their homes by resetting their mortgages.

3. Make Wall Street pay us back.

Sign the petition here.

NYT:

The nation’s biggest banks wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 military members during the housing crisis and seized homes from roughly two dozen other borrowers who were current on their mortgage payments, findings that eclipse earlier estimates of the improper evictions.

Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo uncovered the foreclosures while analyzing mortgages as part of a multibillion-dollar settlement deal with federal authorities, according to people with direct knowledge of the findings. In January, regulators ordered the banks to identify military members and other borrowers who were evicted in violation of federal law.

The analysis, which was turned over to regulators in recent days, provides the first detailed glimpse into the extent of wrongful foreclosures amid the collapse of the housing market. While lenders previously acknowledged that they relied on faulty documents to push through foreclosures, the banks claimed borrowers were rarely evicted by mistake, including military personnel protected by federal law.

“It’s absolutely devastating to be 7,000 miles from your home fighting for this country and get a message that your family is being evicted," says a retired Air Force lawyer who represents troops in foreclosure cases. "We have been sounding the alarms that the banks are illegally evicting the very men and women who are out there fighting for this country. This is a devastating confirmation of that." The big banks say the wrongful foreclosures are only a small fraction of the mortgages being reviewed and they plan to compensate those affected.

[Photo Credit: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg]

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

An executive who the Justice Department says facilitated a scheme to defraud Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is now spearheading JPMorgan Chase's role in the government's program to compensate victims of the big banks' abusive foreclosure practices.

The executive, Rebecca Mairone, worked at Countrywide and Bank of America from 2006 until earlier this year, when she left for JPMorgan Chase, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In a lawsuit filed last month in federal court in New York, Justice Department attorneys allege that Countrywide, which was bought by Bank of America in 2008, perpetrated a two-year scam to foist shoddy home loans on Fannie and Freddie. Neither Mairone nor any other individuals are named as defendants in the civil suit, and no criminal charges have been filed against her or anyone else in connection with the alleged misconduct. But Mairone is one of two bank officials cited in the suit as having repeatedly ignored warnings about the "Hustle," as the alleged scheme was called inside the company, and she prohibited employees from circulating some of those warnings outside their division.

Mairone was chief operating officer of the Countrywide lending division that allegedly carried out the "Hustle." She took the helm of JPMorgan Chase's involvement in the Independent Foreclosure Review this summer, according to a former Chase employee.

The review, overseen by federal banking regulators, requires the nation's biggest banks to compensate victims for harm they inflicted on borrowers. Victims can receive up to $125,000 in cash or, in some cases, get their homes back. But the review has already been marred by evidence that the banks themselves play a major role in identifying the victims of their own abuses, raising the question of whether the review is compromised by a central conflict of interest.

Mairone's role raises additional questions about the Independent Foreclosure Review.

The review "never seemed designed to place first the interests of those who were supposed to be helped u2014 victimized homeowners," said Neil Barofsky, the former federal prosecutor who served as the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as the bank bailout.

"Finding out that the person running it for JPMorgan Chase is a person whose conduct in the run-up to financial crisis was allegedly so egregious that she somehow managed to be one of the only people actually named in a case brought by the Department of Justice goes beyond irony," he continued. "It speaks volumes to the banks' true intent and lack of concern for homeowners when addressing the harm that they caused during the foreclosure crisis."

In response to ProPublica's questions about Mairone's role in the foreclosure review and the suit's allegations, Chase issued a brief statement confirming that Mairone is a managing director who is "working on the Independent Foreclosure Review process." The statement added, "It would not be appropriate for us to discuss another firm's litigation."

Chase declined to make Mairone available for comment, and she did not return a message left at her home number.

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Via Occupy Wall Street, Real Democracy Now! Paris:

To the financial institutions of the world, we have only one thing to say: we owe you NOTHING!

To our friends, families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

To the people of the world, we say: join the resistance, you have nothing to lose but your debts.

On O13, in the larger context of the worlwide "globalnoise" mobilisation, and within the Global Week of Action against Debt, we will mobilise against debt in several cities of the world: Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, New York, Rome…

The governments' response to the financial and economic crisis is the same everywhere: cuts in expenditure and austerity measures under the pretext of reducing deficits and the repayment of a public debt which is the direct outcome of decades of neoliberal policies. The same neoliberal policies that have plundered economic and natural resources and exploited human lifes in Latin America, Asia and Africa for decades, are now also being imposed on the people of Europe and North America.

Governments in the service of finance are using this pretext to further reduce social spending, lower wages and pensions, privatize public utility and goods, dismantle social benefits and deregulate labour laws, and increase taxes on the majority, while social and tax giveaways are generalized for the big companies and the highest income households, the rich, the 1%.

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From Framed Crooks:

"Last September 17th, as part of a wave of global protest, people from across the country raced to the heart of New York's financial district to occupy Wall Street. In the face of big banks foreclosing on our homes, killing our jobs, buying up our democracy, and turning our environment into just another toxic asset, you showed up, and we became the 99%." And we continue on: http://s17nyc.org

A recent Atlanta news report details instances of foreclosure fraud in Georgia and how Georgia officials fail to take prosecutorial action despite a new law that makes foreclosure fraud a felony, punishable by fines and jail time.

We are at a crossroads. Access to jobs, homes and resources are dwindling. Our right to peacefully gather to discuss what to do about it is aggressively being fought by nationwide police coordination. It is a decisive moment on this planet. One option is to keep being occupied with our daily grind and individual struggles. Or we can take control of our collective destiny and design a future worth living. Worth waking up in the morning for. Worth defending. Worth birthing new life into. This movement is not centrally controlled which is what makes it yours. You create it. You bring your talents, your time and your resources. This is the platform for our Big Ideas. This is the place to find challenges worthy of your passion. Worthy of your life. What is our one demand? You. With strength in numbers there is no limit to what we can do. We need to continue to occupy Wall st. Occupy your street. Occupy this country. Occupy our world. Occupy our future. Occupy Now.

Sharpie parties:

In the age of Facebook and Twitter, a new crime has hit America: "Sharpie parties," gatherings of revelers armed with "Sharpie" magic markers and lured by social media invitations to wreak havoc on foreclosed homes.

Five years into the U.S. foreclosure crisis, Sharpie parties are a new form of blight on the landscape of boarded-up homes, brown lawns and abandoned streets. They are also the latest iteration of collective home-trashing spurred by social media.

At least six Sharpie parties were reported in one California county in recent months, where invitations posted online drew scores to foreclosed homes.

The partygoers are handed Sharpie pens on arrival by their hosts and urged to graffiti the walls - a destructive binge that often prompts other acts of vandalism, including smashing holes in walls and doors, flooding bathrooms and ripping up floors.

If revenge on the banks is the motive, does anyone think the banks really care? They make their money no matter what, that's how they stay rich and powerful, they designed the system to work that way.

Those of us fighting to change the system, and hoping to see crooked bankers punished for things like mortgage fraud will have a more difficult time doing that if we're all looked upon as criminals or potential criminals. Please, think beyond yourself, and remember that there are families still fighting to keep their homes.

Oh, and what happened to the geniuses who destroyed the home in the video? Facebook (They used the site to send out invites, and then posted photos of party.) turned over everything in the accounts of the party "hosts" and they're all facing multiple felony charges.

This week, a 30-second TV ad featuring six real-life foreclosure fighters will air on national television. The spot advertises ‘Occupy Our Homes,’ an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that has empowered thousands of people in housing crisis to fight back against fraudulent foreclosures, to demand fair treatment by mortgage lenders, and, in many cases, to keep their homes. The ad ends with a plug for the movement’s website, OccupyHomes.org, where people can find helpful resources and success stories of communities that have fought back against the banks.

The spot opens with Monique White, a north Minneapolis resident who was the first resident to approach an Occupy group for help in fighting foreclosure. Activists with Occupy Minneapolis occupied her front lawn with tents and banners, and kicked off a seven-month campaign that led to US Bank renegotiating her loan. Five out of the six people featured—including an Atlanta pastor who joined with Occupy to fight the foreclosure of his historic Vine City church—have won their campaigns and fended off foreclosure.

“We’re all in this together,” said Marine veteran and longtime Minneapolis resident Bobby Hull. “Even after we bailed out the banks, they’re stilling trying to take the homes of millions of Americans. I hope this ad will inspire people to fight back like I did, and join forces with the Occupy Homes movement.”

For more information on this ad campaign, visit Occupyourhomes.

Protesters gathered at an vacant and neglected bank-owned home in southeast San Diego on Tuesday to collect debris and transport it to a local bank, where they had hoped to make a "deposit."

They hoped that their efforts would send a message to Bank of America, the reported owner of the property: "Clean up your mess."

The protesters, members of Alliance Of Californians For Community Empowerment, a homeowner advocate group, organized the protest to underscore the filth and possible unwanted behavior that could infiltrate communities as a result from a bank's failure to maintain a vacant foreclosed property.

Members of the group also used the event to push for a city ordinance that would require banks to enter every home in the foreclosure process into a registry. The proposed measure would also fine lenders if they do not properly maintain those homes.

More on this here.