Posts Tagged ‘debate’

A Few Thoughts For Thanksgiving

Monday, November 19th, 2012

With the Thanksgiving holiday almost upon us, I hope you’ll allow me to share a few quick thoughts.

For me it has always been one of the most important holidays of the year, because Thanksgiving is one of those few holidays that everyone in America truly shares.

Wherever you are from, whatever your heritage is, we are one.

In that regard I hope to take a brief respite from our usual debates.

I can come off highly critical and perhaps even a bit cynical here in these pages, but in reality I remain hopeful for the future.

We just came off a rather divisive election, but in a way, elections bring our country together, at least for a day. We all have a common interest and a common goal, and that is to vote.

It was partisan along many lines, but the reality is that all of us just want a stronger and better country, myself included.

We may disagree on how to get there, but the worst thing we can do is to stop working towards that common goal.

In a much different way Thanksgiving also brings our country together. Yes, it’s kind of like an election that we share things in common, but we don’t have the partisanship, we don’t have the divisiveness; we have this idea that we all should be giving thanks for whatever is important in our lives.

And maybe we need a little bit more of that ideal in our everyday lives.

In my life my family, my business, my clients, my friends, my good health, the fact that I live in Florida; these are just some of the things I can be thankful for and that my family can be thankful for.
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Presidential Debates Let Wall Street Off the Hook

Friday, October 26th, 2012

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

So we’ve managed to get through all three presidential debates.

But although the presidential election is (thankfully) in the home stretch, did we really learn anything new about either President Barack Obama or Gov. Mitt Romney?

And more importantly, what everyone should be asking is why neither candidate refused to acknowledge the 900-pound gorillas in the room. They were there, but they got a cursory glance at best. These issues are glaring and obvious, yet it is as if they did not exist. It is the reason why many voters are still scratching their heads and asking the following questions.

Why isn’t housing the No. 1 domestic economic issue in this campaign?

Both the president and Romney spent exceedingly too much time on the national debt, when our economy starts and ends with housing. For the first time since the Great Depression, the real estate market has not pulled the economy out of recession. Structurally that is huge, because it was in fact the real estate market that caused the recession in the first place.

But more importantly, the recession was caused by greed and a confluence of people falling asleep at the switch. You have the government that has not properly regulated the banks, who have used their cozy relationship with the regulators to grow larger and more powerful as our nation’s leaders stood idly by.

And now you are left with entire industries, including Wall Street, effectively overshadowing the role of government. At times it seems like moral character has been checked at the foot of Wall Street.
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Obamacare, the Foreclosure Crisis and the Rule of Law

Friday, June 29th, 2012

This commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being redistributed on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

United States Supreme CourtHuh? What do “Obamacare” and the foreclosure crisis have to do with each other?

Simply put, the legal debate over Obamacare largely centered on the individual mandate, a law that would require people to buy health insurance whether they wanted to or not.

A little to my surprise, the Supreme Court did uphold it, although as a tax.

During the passing of the healthcare law, it seemed that the president assumed that the government had the ability to force people to buy a product from a private company that they did not necessarily want.

The mandate’s survival in the Supreme Court on a much narrower standard apparently leaves the question far from settled.

I felt that there was little, if any, constitutional analysis done by the president and his team when they decided to pass the mandate, except for the fact that they perceived a compelling need for it.

And that’s how the debate over the healthcare law reminded me of the legal debate during the foreclosure crisis.

Back when I started defending homeowners, the judges took a simple view: You borrowed the money, therefore you owe the money, so you have to pay it back.

No one stopped to think whether the banks bringing these foreclosures had the constitutional right to do so.

No one.

No one asked whether the banks had fulfilled their legal requirements before filing suit, such as properly assigning notes and knowing who owned the mortgage.

Instead, there was a preference for expediency. Since the homeowner borrowed the money and owed the money, the homeowner had to pay. The banks would be able to sort out who actually owned anything among themselves, and the most important thing was to get the home away from the homeowner.
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