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.

This is your Moment of Clarity #215: The banks use something called MERS in order to destroy local land records, avoid taxes, and foreclose on our homes. The truth is slowly coming out about it and people are fighting back.

At the advent of MERS, this bastion of our recordation system was rendered obsolete, to the detriment of every owner of real property in the United States.

In September the highest court in the state of Washington ruled that a company that has foreclosed on millions of mortgages nationwide can be sued for fraud, a decision that could cause a new round of trouble for the nation's banks.

The ruling is one of the first to allow consumers to seek damages from Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS), a company set up by the nation's major banks, if they can prove they were harmed.

Legal experts said last month's decision from the Washington Supreme Court could become a precedent for courts in other states. The case also endorsed the view of other state courts that MERS does not have the legal authority to foreclose on a home.

Here you can sign a petition demanding integrity in our land records, and an end to MERS.

Keep fighting,

Lee

The Big Banks accused of abusing homeowners will now help to decide who gets foreclosure aid dollars. What could possibly go wrong?

Via:

Washington is seeking help from an unlikely group in its effort to distribute billions of dollars to struggling homeowners in foreclosure: the same banks accused of abusing homeowners with shoddy foreclosure practices.

In doing so, the regulators are trying to speed the process after a flawed, independent foreclosure review delayed relief for millions of borrowers, according to people briefed on the matter. But housing advocates worry that the banks, eager to end the costly process, could take shortcuts as they comb through loan files for potential errors, in some cases diverting aid from the neediest homeowners.

Regulators say they will check the work. And banks have already agreed to pay a fixed amount to troubled homeowners, creating another backstop.

According to officials involved in the process, who spoke anonymously because the matter is not public, the regulators had few alternatives.

These are the same regulators who just a month ago didn't trust the banks.

Here's how this is supposed to work, the Big Banks will now have to assess each loan for potential errors -- errors they never admitted to in the slap-on-the-wrist settlements with the Justice Department -- which will then help the Big Banks determine how much money each homeowner will receive.

Wow. How about just sending bankers door-to-door and have them slap the 4 million homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure in the face?

Reuters:

"Joseph Keller doesn't expect he'll live to see the end of 2013. He blames the house at 190 Avondale Avenue.

Five years ago, Keller, 10 months behind on his mortgage payments, received notice of a foreclosure judgment from JP Morgan Chase. In a few weeks, the bank said, his three-story house with gray vinyl siding in Columbus, Ohio, would be put up for auction at a sheriff's sale.

The 58-year-old former social worker and his wife, Jennifer, packed up their home of 13 years and moved in with their daughter. Joseph thought he would never have anything to do with the house again. And for about a year, he didn't.

Then it started to stalk him."

- In 2010, the county sued Keller because the house, already picked clean by scavengers, was in a shambles, its hanging gutters and collapsed garage in violation of local housing code.

- The tax collector started sending Keller notices about mounting back taxes, sewer fees and bills for weed and waste removal.

- Last year, Chase's debt collector began pressing Keller to pay his mortgage, which had swollen, with penalties and fees, from $62,100.27 to $84,194.69.

- Worst of all, last January, the Social Security Administration rejected Keller's application for disability benefits; the "asset" on Avondale Avenue rendered him ineligible. Keller's medical problems include advanced liver disease, hepatitis C and inactive tuberculosis. Without disability coverage, he can't get the liver transplant he needs to stay alive.

Mr. Keller is still legally responsible for the home he left after the bank foreclosure notice, because months later, Chase filed to dismiss the foreclosure judgment and the order of sale.

Continue reading »

Due out on newstands January 17th, Matt Taibbi's latest expose on the Big Banks, Big Government, and Wall Street is available online now. As always, it's another "Must Read" if you haven't yet done so. Here's a snippet...

Matt Taibbi:

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. "It is," says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, "the ultimate bait-and-switch."

The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.

Click here for the entire article.

Without reading the final settlement, it's difficult to say, but it seems that this might replace the Independent Foreclosure Review, and provide some real relief for homeowners and families who suffered foreclosures. But, as Lynn Drysdale, a lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid and a former co-chairwoman of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, said: “It’s certainly a victory for consumers and could help entire neighborhoods. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and for those people who have had to totally uproot their lives because of eviction it may still not be enough.”

NYT:

Banking regulators are close to a $10 billion settlement with 14 banks that would end the government’s efforts to hold lenders responsible for foreclosure abuses like faulty paperwork and excessive fees that may have led to evictions, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Under the settlement, a significant amount of the money, $3.75 billion, would go to people who have already lost their homes, making it potentially more generous to former homeowners than a broad-reaching pact in February between state attorneys general and five large banks. That set aside $1.5 billion in cash relief for Americans.

Most of the relief in both agreements is meant for people who are struggling to stay in their homes and need the banks to reduce their payments or lower the amount of principal they owe.

The $10 billion pact would be the latest in a series of settlements that regulators and law enforcement officials have reached with banks to hold them accountable for their role in the 2008 financial crisis that sent the housing market into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. As of early 2012, four million Americans had been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and a huge amount of abandoned homes swamped many states, including California, Florida and Arizona.

The five largest banks involved in the $26 billion settlement with the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial -- are included in the current negotiations.

Moments before Ameia Egana, aged 53, was to be evicted from her fourth floor apartment, she clambered over the balcony railing and jumped to her death. Police at the scene said she died on impact. It is the second suicide in Spain in a matter of weeks; a man facing eviction in Grenada was found hanging in his home. A local judge called to the scene said the law on evictions must be changed. Al Jazeera's Peter Sharp reports.

On Monday, Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos promised that no needy family will go homeless over mortgage arrears, responding to public fury over Egana's suicide as she was being evicted.

Via Reuters:

Facing accusations that politicians and banks are complicit in de facto "murder", Spain's banking association said its members would suspend eviction orders for two years for those borrowers worst hit by economic crisis and record unemployment.

Banks have repossessed close to 400,000 homes in Spain since a property bubble burst in 2008 and the nation subsequently sank into recession, throwing millions out of work and unable to keep up mortgage payments to the banks.

Nearly one million homes now sit vacant in Spain. A citizens' movement called "Stop Evictions" asked the banks earlier this year to forgive mortgage debt for properties worth less than 200,000 euros, and where all family members are unemployed. Currently under Spanish law, even when borrowers turn their home over to the banks, they must still pay the entire amount of the mortgage.

Police unions have agreed to support officers who refuse to participate in eviction proceedings. But until government finalizes reforms to eviction laws, there are those who will still face eviction and homelessness. Meanwhile, the banks are set to receive part of an up to 100 billion euro European bailout to offset their financial hardships as so many are unable to pay their mortgage debts.

Wells Fargo is the latest collateral damage from the housing boom. U.S. prosecutors are suing the bank -- the country’s largest originator of home loans -- for defrauding the government, accusing it of issuing mortgages without proper discern and then lying about their condition to the Federal Housing Administration. When these problematic loans later defaulted, the Federal Housing Administration was obligated to cover the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. The lawsuit attempts to reclaim those damages. “The bank will present facts to vigorously defend itself against this action,” a Wells Fargo rep said in a statement.

NYT:

In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the prosecutors accused Wells Fargo, the country’s largest originator of home loans, of defrauding the government for more than a decade. The bank recklessly issued mortgages and then made false certifications about their condition to the Federal Housing Administration, a government agency that insured them, the complaint said.

The problematic loans were not eligible for the government insurance, according to the lawsuit, and when they soured, the F.H.A. was obligated to cover the losses. The Justice Department is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

“Yet another major bank has engaged in a longstanding and reckless trifecta of deficient training, deficient underwriting and deficient disclosure, all while relying on the convenient backstop of government insurance,” Preet S. Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, whose office filed the lawsuit, said in a statement.

According the the government's complaint, Wells Fargo knew about the vast number of deficient loans but concealed them from the F.H.A.

As Des Moines police handcuffed Occupy activists on Monday at a Wells Fargo bank, one protester yelled out “My only regret is that I only have two arms to cuff.”

The folks at Occupy Des Moines have been busy protesting at various Wells Fargo branches in their area - as are many other Occupiers - as the date for the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting in San Francisco draws near. It's been anticipated that there may even be infiltrators at the annual meeting that takes place every Spring.

Ten Occupy Des Moines activists were arrested Monday at the Wells Fargo branch downtown during lunch hour:

While police stood on a corner waiting for the jail van to arrive, protesters took Wells Fargo to task over a number of accusations, including foreclosures, inadequate tax payments, and funding of payday lenders and factory farms.

“I’m here today,” yelled Jessica Reznicek in the “mic check” style popularized by the Occupy movement. “To tell the banks to stop using our money to ruin our lives.”

Reznicek, 30, was a member of the Occupy movement in Des Moines and has been arrested several times.

It was a first arrest for others in the group, including two protesters in their 70s.
...
“My only regret,” shouted Ryan Laudick as police handcuffed him, “is that I only have two arms to cuff.”

The group cheered each time one of their fellow occupiers were loaded into the police van. Misdemeanor citations were issued for standing, loitering and obstructing persons, and all were released shortly afterwards.

A disturbing report from Reuters today:

In July 2009, Roy and Sheila Bowers refinanced the mortgage on their suburban ranch home in Topeka, Kansas. The couple wanted to take advantage of the low interest rates that were all the rage at the time.

Roy, a truck driver, and Sheila, a former hotel housekeeping supervisor, knew their new loan from Wells Fargo would enable them to save $198.86 a month - a nice chunk to help with gas and groceries.

But what the Bowers never imagined was that their old loan, the one Wells Fargo told them was paid off, would resurrect itself, trashing their credit report, scotching their son's student loans and throwing the whole family into foreclosure. All, they say, even though they didn't miss a single mortgage payment.

The Bowers are not alone.

More and more, homeowners say that mortgages they thought were dead and buried are springing back to life, sometimes haunting them all the way into foreclosure.

"It's the most egregious manifestation of an industry that's seriously broken," said Ira Rheingold, a lawyer who is the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocate.

According to several attorney generals, these problems are only going to intensify. Time to put your attorney general on speed dial, perhaps.