Ban Foreclosures Now

What would happen to you if you got caught forging a mortgage application? You’d go to jail. And rightly so.

In one case in Florida, an employee of GMAC Mortgage admitted under oath that he personally forged 10,000 foreclosure affidavits. This low-level schlub is the tip of the tip of a massive iceberg, one of countless “robo-signers” whom voracious banks including GMAC, Bank of America, Citibank and JPMorganChase hired in order to kick American families out of their homes as quickly as possible.

Ignoring state banking laws, which require bank officers to review each foreclosure document to make sure all the facts are correct, banks instead hired low-wage “Burger King kids,” as B of A execs called them, to sign thousands of foreclosures they never looked at. Many were signed under someone else’s name.

Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures—maybe millions—were processed illegally by these huge banks gone wild. “Behind the question of improper foreclosure documentation lies a more important issue of whether lenders even have legal standing to foreclose because they lack the original mortgage note as required by law,” reports The New York Times.

One guy got evicted from his house in Florida despite the fact that his mortgage had been completely paid off years earlier. Thousands of people who purchased illegally foreclosed properties may not have legal title.

Prosecutors in Ohio, Florida and at least 20 other states are investigating one of the biggest acts of wholesale fraud in the history of American business.

When the scandal broke on October 8th the banks declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures. Two weeks later, they declared the whole fuss a simple matter of paperwork and resumed their happy work of reducing millions of jobless Americans to homelessness.

“There is not a single case where a foreclosure was made in error,” said Bank of America spokesman Dan Frahm (if that’s his real name). “The facts supporting the foreclosures are correct.”

Bank of America plans to evict 102,000 families next month alone.

Adam Levitin, an associate law professor at Georgetown University, expressed doubt that the same banks that effectively rejected 99 percent of loan-modification applications by intentionally “losing” paperwork had suddenly become efficient. “The banks have dragged their feet and taken forever to do loan modifications, yet within less than two weeks they have managed to review hundreds of thousands of foreclosure cases,” he said. “It is simply not credible.”

“These are banks going to court and committing fraud,” said Ira Rheingold of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. “For them to say this is a minor technical problem is mind-boggling.”

Meanwhile, Florida officials are looking into charges that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac foreclosed on 70,000 homes in the state during 2009 using forged court documents.

Enough is enough.

It is time to stop foreclosures.

Not for a few weeks. Not temporarily.

Forever.

Foreclosure has always been terrible for America. It’s bad enough to fall on hard times, whether it’s due to a medical catastrophe or a job loss. Getting kicked out of your house forces you to couch-surf or camp outside, struggling to survive day to day. This makes it even harder to get back on your feet.

Foreclosures penalize spouses and innocent children. And, as studies have shown, shuttered houses reduce property values in the surrounding neighborhood.

At this writing millions of American families are in default on their mortgages. It’s only going to get worse. The real unemployment rate is over 20 percent and rising. The global economy is still tanking. And the Obama Administration hasn’t even bothered to propose a single jobs program. If this keeps up, we’ll all be living outside while our empty former homes fall apart.

Flint, Michigan: America’s glorious future?

It’s not as though banks don’t have other ways to induce people to meet their monthly nut. If you default, they can trash your credit rating. Good luck getting another mortgage later.

Even if you don’t care about common decency or social stability, consider the cause of justice: The banks are criminal enterprises. Their executives are gangsters who think nothing of charging 40 percent interest on credit cards and lines of credit.

The banks don’t deserve to get “their” houses back through foreclosure. (We don’t even know if they’re “their” houses.)

Don’t look to Obama or the Democrats for help. They work for the banks. We need neighborhoods to form mutual-defense organizations. When a family gets evicted, everyone should help them move their stuff back in and guard the house to keep out the fraud-happy banksters and their rent-a-cops.

What of the banks? These corporate maniacs should be treated as harshly as the individuals they pretend to be for the purpose of buying campaign ads. What they’ve done is the equivalent of robbing a million convenience stores.

Lock them in prison. Throw away the key. And seize their property. Shut them down. Or, if they’re “too big to fail,” rescue them—through nationalization.

A nationalized bank might still do evil things. But their profits would belong to us—not corporate criminals.

(Ted Rall is the author of the new political call to arms, “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Advice Obama Has To Ignore

American capitalism is broken. So is the Democratic-Republican duopoly that supports it. Neither can be fixed. The system is collapsing. A power vacuum is beginning to open.

As murderous as our dying system is, it still features a veneer of sanity. What comes next will certainly be worse. It will probably be Very Bad. Dictatorship? A 21st century po-mo variant of fascism? Warlordism? A Christianist Taliban-style terror state, as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”?

Before moronic right-wing tyrants seize power, I urge in my new book “The Anti-American Manifesto,” the left should do it first. Well, first they have to become a big-L Left: organized, and with a program the people of the Soon-to-be Former United States of America can get behind.

Readers and critics agree with my analysis of the situation. But, they complain, my “Manifesto” doesn’t contain that political program.

That’s intentional. The “Manifesto” is a call to arms. Everyone, left to right, is invited to join the revolution. Our common enemy—corporate leeches and their political lapdogs—is mortally wounded but still vicious. This isn’t the time, as the Chinese would say, for splittism. Besides, at 288 pages it’s already too long for a manifesto. With a detailed program it would have been 500.

Still, people keep asking me: What would you do, Ted Rall?

Maybe it’s perverse, but my best answer is to list what I’d tell Obama to do if he wanted to save himself, the Democrats, and the capitalist system.

Don’t worry. He won’t.

He can’t.

His bosses won’t allow it.

If I were Obama, my first act would be to shut down the banking system and securities markets for a week or two. Why? To prevent the capital flight that might follow what comes next. I’d announce that any attempt to transfer money or securities overseas during this period would be prosecuted as an act of treason.

Next I’d order an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, contractors and sub-contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, and all foreign military bases around the world. We’re an overextended empire inviting blowback all over the place. No more.

It would be moral. The world would be happy. It would make us safer. However, my primary motivation would be to stop chucking hundreds of billions down the military rathole while Americans are losing their jobs and their homes. $4 to $6 billion a week on Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Can anyone explain why we still have thousands of soldiers in the DMZ between the two Koreas? Or in Okinawa? Bring the 600,000-plus men and women in uniform, and the millions of support personnel who aren’t, home.

Obama doesn’t need congressional approval. He can bring the troops home by executive order.

Next up: nationalizations. “Tough on crime” shouldn’t be limited to individual citizens. Rob a 7-Eleven and you go to prison for many years. If it’s your third felony, for life. You lose everything. Companies deemed “too big to fail,” many of which are run by criminals whose monstrous deeds make Charles Manson look like a piker, should get the same treatment or worse.

Jail the executives. Seize their personal assets. And nationalize their companies.

Citigroup alone is worth $14 trillion. That should pay for some extensions of unemployment benefits.

BP’s North American operations? Ours. Sell off the assets. Use the cash to pay for the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico and to compensate the victims.

Too harsh? Corporations can easily avoid this awful fate. They can obey the law.

Once the U.S. government has added BP, GM, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and other miscreants to its portfolio, trillions will be rolling into the treasury. China will start borrowing money from us.

What to do with all that loot?

Well, we’ll have a bunch of unemployed soldiers and military contractors. Between them and those who lost their jobs during the last few years we’ll need to create between 10 and 20 million new jobs. So we will. Let’s build the high-speed rail system the U.S. should have created 40 years ago. We’ll be able to afford true healthcare reform, a.k.a. socialized medicine. That means more hospitals, more doctors, more jobs.

Let’s rehab the 20 million abandoned homes nationwide so that the world’s richest nation can finally house its homeless. Let’s repair and update long-neglected infrastructure.

Oh, and let’s put an end to the insanity of home foreclosures. Not only do evictions speed downward mobility, empty houses ruin neighborhoods. If you can’t pay your mortgage or rent because you lost your job, don’t worry—we’ll work out a solution.

After all, we the people will own your bank—and thus your note.

The U.S. economy is broken. But the U.S. remains spectacularly rich.

Let’s stop pretending we’re poor. All we need to do to save ourselves is unlock the wealth being hoarded by corporate pigs.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” now in stores. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL