In what is likely to be the biggest vote-buying scheme in the history of vote-buying schemes the U.S. Attorney Generals of all 50 states agreed to a $25 billion settlement with the Federal Government over the outright fraud of improperly filling out and filing hundreds of thousands of mortgages which led to thousands of improper foreclosures. The vote buying aspect of this is the $2000 to be paid to each former home owner so improperly evicted.
This result is nothing short of an outrage to the damage caused not only to the individuals who suffered at the hands of the predatory mortgage servicing companies who never had clear title to foreclose but also to nearly 900 years of property tort law with respect to the claims of title. Not one person will go to jail for any of this while thousands of people benefited from knowingly committing fraud.
The Obama administration released a statement saying this would help the housing industry, yes, by clearing the way for the banks to begin a whole new round of foreclosure proceedings. It makes a mockery of everyone in the U.S. who paid on their mortgages for the past three years.
The only people happy with this settlement are the banks so named in the suit: Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), JPMorgan Chase and Co (NYSE:JPM), Wells Fargo Securities (NYSE, WFC), Citigroup (NYSE:C) and Ally Financial. I’m actually surprised, given this administration’s proclivities, that Goldman Sachs wasn’t squeezed off a few bucks for their troubles. God’s work does have it’s price, you know. They get to use money stolen from the taxpayers, currently drawing interest at the Fed to pay back the very people they defrauded in the first place and no one, not one person, will go to jail.
