In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.
"The mortgage servicers hired people who would never question authority," said Peter Ticktin, a Deerfield Beach, Fla., lawyer who is defending 3,000 homeowners in foreclosure cases. As part of his work, Ticktin gathered 150 depositions from bank employees who say they signed foreclosure affidavits without reviewing the documents or ever laying eyes on them -- earning them the name "robo-signers."
Barrry Ritholtz is pleading for criminal charges to filed with an urgency that suggests, at least to me, that the likelihood of any justice being done is pretty slim. Why? Well I'll highlight it for you.
If your home was broken into by a firm to change the locks illegally, that is breaking and entering, and conspiracy. If the wrong bank filed a foreclosure action, if the wrong house was foreclosed upon, its time to go criminal prosecution route.
Go to the local police department, fill out the requisite forms. Then go to your District Attorney’s Office or County Prosecutor’s office, and ask to speak to someone in charge. Tell them you want to prosecute. You can also contact your state Attorney General about the same. Follow up with written letters, that you send you your local newspaper and the NYT, WSJ, USA Today.
If any local DAs balk — some will know bank execs from the political groups and golf courses — let them know you will keeping a written record of all of this, and you plan to make sure that their opponent in the next election knows all about their bank coddling ways. When they stammer, hammer them about their opponent’s interest in who is and isn’t a bank bitch.
Change "some" to "all" and the part in red is the end of it, really. And it's not just "local DAs" either. Fundamentally, the entire power structure, from the local tax assessor to the U.S. Senate is playing golf with the banksters, so to speak. The system doesn't work for hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and assembly line employees who we find here hired to robo-sign one another's foreclosure papers. It works for the banksters on the golf course. This isn't to say that Ritholtz isn't right to recommend that people attempt to bring legal action if for no other purpose than to highlight hypocrisies. But don't expect any of those hypocrisies to be overturned any time soon.
Update: For a decent example of just how entrenched bankster interest is, see Matt Taibbi's post on the upcoming second round of quantitative easing from the Fed.
QE is difficult to understand and the average person could listen to a Fed official talk about it for two hours right to his face and not understand even the basic gist of his speech. The ostensible justification for QE is to use a kind of financial shock-and-awe approach to jump-starting the economy, but its effects for ordinary people are hard to calculate. Theoretically the entire country has some sort of stake in this program, as (among other things) U the Homeowner may see your home value stay stable or fall less than it would have thanks to this artificial stimulus. You also may be able to buy a house when you wouldn’t before, thanks to declining mortgage rates.
And jobs, I suppose, may theoretically be created by all this dollar meth being injected into the financial bloodstream – although the inflationary effect of printing trillions upon trillions of new dollars would probably wipe out the value of the money you make at that job. When it comes to calculating what QE actually does for you, or how much it harms you, that question is just very hard to answer.
But one thing we know for sure is that big banks and Wall Street speculators are real, immediate beneficiaries of the program, as they suddenly have trillions of printed dollars flowing through the financial system, with endless ways to profit on the new chips entering the casino.
And by an amazing coincidence, many of the biggest players in the financial services industry have a habit of buying up MBS or Treasuries just before these magical money-printing programs of the Fed send their respective values soaring. If you own a big fund, for instance, and you know that the Fed is about to buy a trillion dollars of mortgage-backed-securities through a new Quantitative Easing program, buying a buttload of MBS a few weeks early is a pretty easy way to make a risk-free fortune. One of the worst-kept secrets on Wall Street is that the big bankers and fund managers get signals about the Fed’s intentions about things like QE well before they are announced to the rest of us losers in the public.
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