An ostensibly conservative media is still trying to blame borrowers for the multiple frauds that were committed by the banks. And it’s still not working:
Millions of Americans have stopped paying their mortgages, creating a giant paperwork snafu and legal crisis, and yet… Funny how many media accounts begin with that rarest of creatures, a homeowner fully paid up on his mortgage, or better yet a Florida man who paid cash for his house, and who was foreclosed on anyway thanks to a paperwork error by some confused bank. This poor shmuck then is made to symbolize the larger phenomenon when in fact the larger phenomenon is precisely the opposite.
You can’t understand the latest mortgage mess without understanding the powerful appetite to cast borrowers as victims and banks as villains in the housing bubble. This tendency is present in claims that minorities have been especially victimized, that people were sold loans they didn’t understand.
The battle of the narratives is reaching its climax in the robo-signer controversy, with lawyers seizing upon technicalities to let people go on living in homes they’ve stopped paying for.
We hasten to add that technicalities are important; the rule of law is nothing but a profound commitment to honor technicalities. But let’s understand that in the absence of the snafu, we’d have a faster, smoother-working foreclosure process, in which more Americans would more quickly be shoved out into the street in perfect compliance with the law.
It is really remarkable how the self-appointed defense attorneys for the mortgage banks keep dancing desperately around the word FRAUD like wildebeest at a crocodile-infested waterhole. There was no “snafu”. There were no “clerical errors”. There were no “paperwork mistakes”. There was only the mass and ongoing commitment of FRAUD. The loans were FRAUDULENTLY made in the first place. Then the titles were FRAUDULENTLY transferred, after which they were utilized to sell FRAUDULENT securities. When the loans went bad, as many of them were specifically designed to do, the banks then produced FRAUDULENT documents to replace the originals that were either destroyed or showed evidence of the previous FRAUD committed by the bank.
The bankers are the villains here. There is no “elusive search” to be conducted, in fact, there is no debating this! And many, if not most of the defaulting borrowers were one of the many victims of the multiple frauds committed by the villains. The ironic thing is that this disingenuous Wall Street tool complains about politicians having “moved heaven and earth to prop up the self-same banks” when his entire column is yet another feeble attempt to downplay the criminal activity of the banks and shift responsiblity away from them.