by Ellen Pilelsky – From the Heart
There is something so deeply wrong and disturbing with the current foreclosure crisis.
Simply: While most of us have some opinion as to the foreclosure mess, many don’t seem to care about the incredible amount of fraud that has occurred and continues to take place each day.
Some argue that people who fail to pay their mortgages, regardless of their reasons, are “deadbeats.” But, what about the fact some of the largest and wealthiest banks are missing documents used to remove people from their homes? And, in our “rocket docket” State of Florida, there are retired judges who are merely rubber stamping the foreclosure papers filed by the lenders’ firms without actually reviewing the merits of each case?
In Matt Taibbi’s rather eye opening and disturbing article Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners appearing in Rolling Stone Magazine November 10 issue, he recounts a day of going to a Jacksonville court and experiencing first hand the outrageous and flagrant rubber stamping of cases without judicial review.
Shouldn’t it matter that many of these cases result in people being forced to leave their homes when the very banks in question can’t even produce the documents needed to prove their case? Isn’t it a bit odd that these wealthy banks are not being subject to the same level of scrutiny?
Or is this politics as usual? After all, many of these banks sold the mortgages of people to “investors” –other banks or trusts. And, many of those trusts do not have the documentation to prove they have the original documents. Wall Street, in fact, was part of this process and made huge sums of money.
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