What would he have said about the banks fraudulent acts?
Last weekend Chuck Coulson, the man once called Richard Nixon’s ‘hatchet man”, passed away at the age of 80.
Known both for his being one of the ‘Watergate Seven’ and his subsequent 2nd life as a born-again evangelist, I can only wonder what he thought of of our current foreclosure crisis.
I don’t know if he ever gave it much thought, but I suspect there would be a level of amazement.
Watergate, which started over a single break-in, landed almost 50 men in jail, including many top Nixon aides like Coulson.
The banks have broken into thousands of homes in their efforts to secure ‘abandoned properties’. Except you and I both know that most of these homes were anything but abandoned.
Sometimes they weren’t even in foreclosure. I’ve had about a dozen clients who’ve had their locks changed or had their homes ransacked by repo agents who were hired by the banks.
The banks, playing the role of Nixon and his cronies, have used aggressive tactics that Coulson, in his days as Nixon’s legal counsel, might have employed.
Coulson allegedly said he would walk over his own grandmother to get the president re-elected, which sounds appropriate because banks have done almost everything else in order to foreclose on homeowners who often didn’t deserve it.
Yet for crimes that would seem to fit in any file on Watergate, there is not a single banking executive who has been arrested.
I’ll bet good money Coulson would wonder why.
Coulson was convicted for his efforts in trying to discredit the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, but what would he have said about the ‘hatchet job’ banks have done on homeowners?
(more…)
