Tom Eley
Global Research
Wall Street has raised its voice against any government moratorium on foreclosures, even as evidence mounts that banks systematically and illegally falsified documents in order to expedite hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of foreclosures.
Documented examples of abuse include banks hiring contractors and what one Goldman Sachs executive referred to as “Burger King kids” to process thousands of foreclosure documents per week, all the while declaring to courts they were familiar with the cases. Lenders also falsified signatures, notary stamps, and tossed legal documents into the garbage. Every major bank is implicated in the widening scandal.
Yet to the barons of Wall Street these examples of law breaking—what a number of state attorneys general have called a “fraud on the court”—are immaterial, and those who were evicted deserved their fate.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, whose bank is implicated in the scandal, said this week in a conference call that there have been no accidental evictions. “We’re not evicting people who deserve to stay in their house,” the multimillionaire banker declared.
“If you didn’t pay your mortgage, you shouldn’t be in your house. Period,” Walter Todd of the investment advisory firm Greenwood Capital Associates, told Reuters.
“Everyone’s responsible for following the law. If we all don’t have to pay our mortgage, should we just stop paying taxes, too?” said Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisers. Everyone has to follow the law except the banks, that is. Schutz added, “Your mortgage didn’t get to a robo-signer by accident, it’s because you’re not paying.”
As Paul Krugman of the New York Times notes, “In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.”
Krugman attempts to distinguish these claims by Wall Street with the position of the Obama administration, whose opposition to a moratorium on foreclosures the Times columnist suggests is a policy mistake. In fact, the White House is of one mind with the banks.
In spite of mounting popular anger toward Wall Street—and the upcoming off-year elections—the Obama administration this week categorically ruled out any national moratorium on foreclosures, instead encouraging banks to review their own practices and carry through with foreclosures “as quickly as possible,” according to the Washington Post.
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