Be sure to catch the remarks about LPS. Insane in the Membrane!
Naked Capitalism-
If you ask a homeowner who has tried to get a government-certified mortgage modification from a bank, half the time you’ll hear a story of lost paperwork, incompetence, and interminable phone calls to call centers with unhelpful staffers. Recent foreclosure mitigation programs designed by the government are not merely poorly conceived, they are poorly implemented. In discussing principal write-downs, one must take this into account. Who is going to do the writing down? Who will be eligible? What about homes with second mortgages? Most importantly, is there a good database that can match those second mortgages to first mortgages?
The Government Accountability Office has shown, as recently as March of 2011 that there are serious operational problems with the second lien write-down program implemented by Treasury to date. Bluntly speaking, the GAO reports, Fannie doesn’t have the computer systems and quality databases to match second mortgages with first mortgages.
“Obama may talk of the “99 percent” but his administration is engaged in an aggressive coverup of bank crimes.”
Politico-
Bubbling under the surface of politics is the foreclosure crisis — where the power of big finance is brushing up against the rule of law. The party leaders seem to have decided it is essentially a giant — but unavoidable — tragedy. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said foreclosures have to clear for the housing market to reset. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has spent only about $2 billion of the $75 billion authorized for the Home Affordable Modification Program.
But the foreclosure crisis is not only a few million personal tragedies. It is a few million crime scenes.
One has to be extremely out of touch with what’s happening but good thing there’s Abigail’s dose of Reality Check!
Saying it like it is.
Abigail C. Field-
Yesterday the Washington Post ran a grotesquely bank-skewed editorial chastising New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for his refusal to play ball with the hush money “50 state AG” settlement on the table. Matt Stoller pointed out that the Washington Post owns Kaplan schools, a for profit network of schools, and Schneiderman’s investigating for-profit schools, a fact that the WaPo didn’t disclose. But the Kaplan connection is important in another way too, as it probably explains why the WaPo had so much empathy for the banks in the editorial, and displayed so little understanding of the banks’ victims.
A lot of people have asked why New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is going after the banks as aggressively as he is. It’s almost unbelievable that one lone elected official, who happens to have powerful legal tools at his disposal, is doing something that no one with any serious degree of power has done. So what is the secret? What kind of machinations is he undertaking that no one else has been able to do?
I’ve known Schneiderman for a few years, back when he was a state Senator working to reform the Rockefeller drug laws. And my answer to this question is pretty simple. He wants to. That’s it. Eric Schneiderman is investigating the banks because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. So he’s doing it. This guy has thought about his politics. He wrote an article about how he sees politics in 2008 in the Nation, and in his inaugural speech as NY AG he talked about the need to restore faith in both public and private institutions. Free will still counts for something, apparently.
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