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Politics of Foreclosure? The Wall Street Journal Needs a Reminder

Wed Mar 21, 2012 by on Foreclosure Fraud

Over a year ago I felt compelled to call out The Wall Street Journal after a particular column really got under my skin.

It’s time to call them out once more. Not for another column, but rather, a lack of one.

In October 2010 their column “The Politics of Foreclosure” made light of the plight many of my clients have undergone, and shrunk the foreclosure crisis down to a mere inconvenience for a few Washington insiders.

You and I, of course, know different.

And as the crisis grew wider and wider, and the expansiveness of the banks fraud became even more apparent, The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board continued to be a haven for outdated ideas, protection of the status quo and disgust for anyone trying to do good by the American homeowner.

When the AG settlement was first announced back in February, the Wall Street Journal called it a ‘bank job’ worthy of the Barker gang.

I found it disturbingly amusing that a settlement that was basically little more than a public spanking for the banks angered them so. The settlement didn’t land a single banking executive in jail, yet the columnists at The Wall Street Journal still treat the banks as the victims in the housing crisis.

The crisis, you know that the banks basically created.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board still believes the banks didn’t illegally foreclose on a single homeowner, something I personally know not to be true.

Either their editorial board is remarkably stupid or just ignorant.

And so I shouldn’t be all that surprised that they have been silent after the Department of Housing and Urban Development released audits that laid out how pervasive the culture of fraud was amongst our nation’s lenders.

If robosigning was, as The Wall Street Journal referred to it just the ‘nameless, faceless employee in the back office who reviewed the file, not the other nameless, faceless employee who sits in the front’, then why did the banks go through such giants roadblocks to keep HUD investigators at bay?

The entire process of submitting foreclosure claims was flawed, and HUD said exactly that. The pressure to push these illegal documents through came from the top. Managers ignored the signers admissions that they ‘could not handle the workload’, and responded by demanding a faster turnaround.

The lenders’ integrity was compromised, and the documents they submitted were, once again using HUD’s own words, unreliable and inauthentic…in other words, fraudulent.

But you wouldn’t know that if you read the Wall Street Journal’s editorials.

The paper reported on the audits yes, but there was no retraction, no admissions that maybe, just maybe, robosigning was more than an just a pesky little problem.

So where is the outrage now? Certainly not in the Wall Street Journal. Unless it’s against Eric Schneiderman. Or Martha Coakley.

Their editorial board must be living on another planet.

The outrage, however, is still right here in my blog.

The banks may not be trying to pass off fraudulent documents like they used to, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try every dirty trick in the book to get you out of your home.

As I said last year, the banks hijacked the judicial system (and they are still trying), and whether the Wall Street Journal will admit it or not, everyone else now knows it.

From The Trenches,
Roy Oppenheim

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