President Obama has done more to help the poor and middle class than any President since LBJ

[Octafish]

211. No. That's different. This involves millions of INNOCENT people who lost their homes to BANKSTERS.

The Fed messed with the wrong senator

If foreclosure victims get justice, trace it back to a bad decision to stonewall Elizabeth Warren last week

BY DAVID DAYEN
Salon.com April 15, 2013

I have spent the better part of four years trying, with little success, to raise awareness about foreclosure fraud, the largest consumer fraud in the history of the United States. In fact, there’s a whole little band of us writers and activists and foreclosure fighters. We have provided multitudes of evidence about fake documents, forged documents, illegal foreclosures, foreclosures on military members while they served overseas, foreclosures on homes with no mortgages, breaking and entering into the wrong homes, suicides by foreclosure victims, and above all the complete lack of accountability for these crimes and abuses.

But instead of giving voice to thousands upon thousands of victims of illegal foreclosures, instead of documenting the banks’ criminal practices, maybe what we all should have done is simply let the Office of Comptroller of the Currency – part of the Treasury Department — and the Federal Reserve construct their own settlement with the banks. Then, when it utterly unraveled — as it has over the past couple of months — the unimaginable fraud heaped upon homeowners would get more attention than ever before, particularly from a frustrated and angry Congress led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Indeed, despite OCC and the Fed’s best efforts to protect banks from harm, they’ve actually exposed them like never before. If I didn’t know better, I’d think there were moles among this gang-that-couldn’t-regulate-straight.

SNIP...

This all spilled out in an ugly manner over the past week. OCC released the payment announcement, and you can describe reactions with two words: laughable and infuriating. The vast majority of borrowers – 3.4 million – will receive $1,000 or less. To pick a category at random, 234,000 borrowers had a loan modification approved, were kicked out of their homes anyway, and will receive for their trouble – for having their home effectively stolen – a whopping $300 (for comparison’s sake, the third-party consultants got $10,000 per review). In all, as many as 1.2 million borrowers faced foreclosure under potentially illegal circumstances. This translates to an endless supply of ready-made news stories about foreclosure victims who stand to receive an insultingly low check for their suffering, despite doing everything asked of them. CBS News has already started running them.

CONTINUED...

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/15/fed_messed_with_the_wrong_senator/