Archive for December, 2011

Drug Dealer or Florida Homeowner: Who Does Constitution Really Protect?

Monday, December 19th, 2011

The Oppenheim Law editorial team found this ironic: A drug dealer has more constitutional rights to protection from the government in his home than your average homeowner in foreclosure.

In a case being appealed to the United States Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court recently held that because the “home” has a long standing history of receiving additional constitutional protect

Interestingly enough, the U.S. government, through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, is the single largest investor of residential mortgages. So what this really means is that the government can steal your house through bad loan paperwork and fraudulent foreclosure practices, but the local drug dealer is safe from a sniff by Franky the Drug Sniffing Dog.ions, using a drug sniffing dog outside the front door of a drug dealer’s house constituted an illegal search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Yet this same court has allowed banks and investors to use the lower courts in Florida as their own private collection agency.

This is yet one more example of the absurd turn that this country has taken during the real estate crash and subsequent foreclosure crisis, putting the government into the position of protecting the sanctity of a home owned by a drug dealer violating criminal laws, while stripping the same protections from one who is just down on his financial luck, in part due to the banks themselves.

The English belief that “every man’s house is his castle” formed the basis of the Fourth Amendment, and yet now has been convoluted to only protect criminals from prosecution, while leaving homeowners in foreclosure high and dry against a system that steamrolls their constitutional rights in the interest of protecting big banks, Wall Street, and now Uncle Sam.
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The Truth Behind the Federal Reserve Drive Thru Window by Roy Oppenheim

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Foreclosure fraud files are nothing these days. The latest secret reports from the Federal Reserve are hard to fathom for most people including myself. The report reiterates the notion that our nation ever so quickly resembles that of a crony capitalistic third-world regime. Thanks to Bloomberg Magazine, however, we now have a better picture how, as a country, we all have been played for a sucker. Especially the state of Florida being listed as one of the top foreclosure states.

 

So, it is no wonder Bloomberg had to mount a legal fight under the Freedom of Information Act before the Federal Reserve would turn over their scathing files. While the narrative is not necessarily new, the facts are beyond our wildest imagination.

 

Scheme, Scam and Shame

Simply put, the Federal Reserve loaned the largest banks in the United States and abroad $7.7 trillion – that’s right in 2008 and allowed the banks to buy U.S. Treasury bonds that netted the banks a neat little profit of $14 billion. To give some perspective here the $7.7 trillion equals three quarters of the gross domestic product of the United States for any one year or is three times the total aggregate consumer debt of all people living in the United States.

Federal Reserve Drive Thru Window – Banks Only

Now if you or I had tried to show up at the Fed’s “discount window” – that is what the facility is called where the largest banks received their $7.7 trillion, – we would never have even found the window to begin with. And should we have found the window we would have found that it is only open to the largest banks in the world.
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Believe in Santa or Federal Reserve? Roy Oppenheim’s Truth or Consequences

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Florida foreclosure defense attorney and legal blogger Roy Oppenhem is wondering if we are playing the game Truth or Consequences.

How ironic that a second grade teacher gets in trouble for telling her class that Santa isn’t real, but the Federal Reserve and big banks think it’s OK to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret?

Truths – What we didn’t know

  • The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day.
  • Bankers took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy.
  • No one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $14 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
  • Taxpayers (that means you!) paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
  • The total numbers are staggering: $7.7 trillion of credit—one-half of the GDP of the entire nation. $460 billion was lent to J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley alone—without anybody other than a few select officials at the Fed and the Treasury knowing.

Consequences – What we now know

  • The loans didn’t help to stimulate the job market in anyway — Unemployment rate increased by almost 50 percent, to a nationwide average of 10 percent (even higher in Florida!!)
  • In fact, some of the $14 billion profit from the bailout (an amount that was previously unknown to Congress) was used by the banks to lobby our politicians for new regulations, in order to prevent another bailout! Some was used to directly line the pockets of elected officials as campaign contributions.
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#Occupy Your Homes, No Longer a Silent Protest for #OccupyWallStreet

Friday, December 9th, 2011

 

 

Home for the holidays?

Long before we knew what an ‘Occupier’ was, Florida foreclosure defense attorney Roy Oppenheim talked about what he called Shay’s Rebellion 2.0 , a silent rebellion across the country of frustrated homeowners railing against the banks.

Well that rebellion is no longer silent. In fact’s it’s a deafening roar.

This week Occupy Wall Street protesters rallied around our nation’s embattled homeowners through the off-shoot Occupy Our Homes. Protesters in 20 cities across the nation moved from the nation’s parks to to properties under threat of foreclosure, joining hands to prevent good people from being put out on the streets.

The stories coming out of these protests are frighteningly similar, residents making every effort to work with the banks, either being denied a chance for a loan modification or given the runaround to the point of utter confusion.

In one case a woman is now paying more in rent in the home she once owned. In yet another Wells Fargo acquired a loan belonging to a woman with cerebral palsy and cancer, yet refused to offer her a modification. In each case protesters stood and called out to the community for support, in some cases disrupting the foreclosure process.

“We don’t know how many homes we saved for one more month during the holiday season,”Occupy Atlanta spokesman Tim Franzen told the Associated Press, he said. “It was kind of a Christmas gift to the people.”

The message was overwhelming and undeniable. The public will no longer stand idly by and let people who have been taken advantage of be cast aside by our country’s financial institutions like a child’s old toy.
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