Thursday, April 29, 2010

The New American Kleptocracy



Crooked Corporations





I am not great in terms of following the Financial Reform minutiae. Actually I am not entirely sure I get the politics of it at all. But I do know that the mortgage companies are doing their very best to foreclose on as many American homes as they can possibly get away with. And that even with the specter of Finance Reform looming on the horizon, the banks and mortgage companies are not backing off one iota with their unethical and racketeering ways.

For example, we got behind on a few payments and quite suddenly and out of the blue, our mortgage company no longer would accept payment. They did want very much to foreclose on our house since we have, over the years, made important improvements and the house is now a very beautiful and gracious home, and one that the mortgage company would be able to sell for a very high price in a New York minute. A price by the way that would be far and away beyond the amount currently owed on the mortgage. And while they were busy "not accepting" payments, they were, at the same time, counting all those payments as "missed" or "delinquent" payments so that it would appear in any court of law that we were entirely responsible for the foreclosure and not them. When our legal representative began to try to negotiate with them they went into a very odd mode of losing the papers, and then finding them but they were at another office and then so and so was looking at them but when so and so was contacted the papers had mysteriously disappeared and turned up somewhere on the East Coast. And just as quickly when the East Coast branch was contacted the papers seemed to be somewhere else. All done with no sense of irony but as courteous as you please. So our mortgage company is running a scam with our house and the probability is that the original papers were sold long ago at a hefty profit and they betting that we would not have the wherewithal to take them to court. And if we did their lawyers would be able to stall indefinitely.

While this kind of robbery is going on, the financial whiz guys, the smartest guys in the room, over at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, were also busy ripping off everybody else on Main Street. Keiser calls ours a Kleptocracy. A form of government structured so as to rip off the people it supposedly governs. And the Supremes, (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy) have ruled on this very idea as well, saying in effect: A corporation is well within its rights to sell you a defective product. But you may not pay for this product with a defective check. Now, the Republicans upon hearing such stories shake their heads and tch tch, saying that we were at fault and the poor mortgage company had no choice. But then every Republican I have ever encountered was a known liar and a drunk as well.