Fraudulent political evictions in the US of A

[Tony Gosling]

http://occupyourhomes.org/

VICTORY: Monique White Wins Negotiation to Save Her Home!
OccupyOurHomes on May 03, 
2012   -   http://occupyourhomes.org/blog/2012/may/3/monique-white-victory/
After a 7 month campaign led by Occupy Homes MN, 
Monique White has been offered a new loan by US 
Bank. In October of 2011 Monique was perhaps the 
first homeowner in the nation to approach the 
Occupy movement and ask for help in defending her 
home from an unlawful foreclosure . The 6 month 
campaign to save her home set an historic 
precedent in the Bank and foreclosure reform 
movement. The new loan was offered some 15 months 
after the end of the Redemption period and with a 
payment in keeping with the homes current value.
Supporters have camped out in and around her 
home, led over a dozen marches on US Bank, 
collected over 6,500 petition signatures, packed 
the courtroom, shut down Bank branches, and even 
marched to the homeof US Bank CEO Richard Davis. 
Occupy Homes MN has worked with White and her 
family since October 2011, making national and 
international news in the process.

Dan's Foreclosure Story - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZBRrP5J5Q

7 Foreclosure Horror Stories (And One Possible Win)
Around the country, families are being tossed out 
of their homes with astonishing regularity, with 
local law enforcement enlisted to do the bidding of big banks.
May 9, 
2012  | 
http://www.alternet.org/story/155344/7_foreclosure_horror_stories_(and_one_possible_win)
This week, Christine Frazer and her family were 
thrown out of the Atlanta home they'd lived in 
for 18 years, at gunpoint in the dead of night.
They were not set upon by robbers, but by the 
Dekalb County Sheriff's department, which evicted 
the family at the request of Investors One 
Corporation. As Steven Rosenfeld reported for 
AlterNet, it was the fourth company to buy the 
family's mortgage in eight months.
Occupy Our Homes: Christine Frazer's Story>: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BvY6_hpxlE
The Frazers' eviction is horrifying, but sadly 
their story is all too common. Senator Sherrod 
Brown, who's introduced legislation aiming to 
curtail the worst practices, called it “a 
longstanding ugly pattern of homeowner abuse.”
"You can basically throw a dart off a building 
and hit someone with a foreclosure horror story,” 
said Matt Browner Hamlin of Occupy Our Homes. 
“This is the whole point -- that the crisis is 
being driven by fraud and criminality by the 
banks. Three million people didn't wake up one 
morning and decide to just stop paying their mortgages."
Around the country, families are being tossed out 
of their homes with astonishing regularity, with 
local law enforcement enlisted to do the bidding 
of big banks that own and resell the mortgages, 
utterly detached from the people whose lives are 
turned upside-down in the process. It's easy to 
just look at statistics and forget the human 
stories behind the numbers, so here are six 
stories of families who've had to fight all sorts 
of shady tactics to try and stay in their 
homes—and one family that might just beat the 
bank and get to keep their home, with the help of local activists.

1. Harried into Health Crisis in Hempstead, New York
Charles Pollydore worked on Wall Street, not as a 
trader, but in IT. He was laid off when the 
markets collapsed, but kept paying his $4,200 
monthly mortgage to Bank of America. “I used my 
401k, I used everything I had, emergency funds, 
everything to keep the mortgage going under the 
pretext that I was going to get a job soon,” he 
told AlterNet. “I had to get on welfare, get on 
food stamps, to get my light and my gas to stay 
on. I needed Medicaid because I need medical coverage badly.”
But he didn't find a job, and his diabetes 
worsened—he's legally blind and is facing the 
amputation of a second toe after losing one--and 
he wound up on disability. “My doctors said 
'We're not going to allow yourself to jeopardize 
the health you have right now to keep looking for 
a job,'” he said. His health has dramatically 
deteriorated since his fight with the bank began.
Pollydore, a member of the group New York 
Communities for Change, has been repeatedly 
applying for a mortgage modification to no avail, 
sending documentation, bank statements, hardship 
letters, and more, but over and over the bank 
claims it hasn't received the information. BofA 
refused to offer him a principal reduction 
despite being presented with proof of his 
disability income. “Their strategy is to break 
the backs of homeowners so that you give up and you walk away,” he said.
He's reached out to his congresswoman, Carolyn 
McCarthy, and to the attorney general's office, 
but was told he had to work with Bank of America. 
“What protection is there for people like myself?” he asked.
“I told one of the [bank] executives, 'You guys 
are going to have to board the house up with me 
inside and let me rot and die.'”

2. Fabricated Documents in Rochester, New York
Leonard Spears is 5-feet, 6 inches tall, balding 
and African American, but Wells Fargo, when 
serving a summons to foreclose on the Rochester 
home he'd been fixing up, apparently served a 
6-foot man with blond hair. Spears, of course, 
says he was never served, and Wells Fargo has a 
history not only of predatory lending (it paid an 
$85 million fine for pushing borrowers who were 
qualified for better loans into more risky 
subprime loans) but of foreclosure fraud as well.
“It took me three years to convert it into the 
way it looks now, I did a lot of wiring, tore 
down all the walls, gave up my social life 
completely because I was dedicated to do this, 
because this is like the American Dream, to own 
property, so it was very exciting,” Spears said.
To make matters worse, it turns out that Wells 
Fargo wasn't even the owner of the note, but 
merely the servicer. And then, when the 
foreclosure did go through, the home was sold to 
the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation 
(commonly known as Freddie Mac) for all of $500. 
Yet Spears wasn't able to modify his mortgage to 
stay in his home. “I was willing to pay way more 
than $500,” Spears said. “What kind of justice is that?”
Take Back the Land Rochester, Occupy Rochester 
and others are fighting to get Spears back in his 
home—there's a petition you can sign.

3. Threatening Phone Calls in Waterford, Michigan
After a car accident Kathryn Nava wound up on 
disability and had trouble making her mortgage 
payments. She had a friend who was willing to 
help her make her back payments, but that friend 
wanted to see a payment history before giving her 
the money. Nava called her mortgage lender to 
request that history—and was told it would cost 
her $50 per hour, and take 90 days to receive it.
So she tried again, calling the president of the 
company. She got a voicemail response that 
shocked her so much she recorded it and saved it.
“Let me enlighten you, Kathy. First of all, 
there's nothing in your contract with us says we 
owe you any history, now, next year, five years 
from now or the next time...I've begun 
foreclosure today. I bet you're sorry now that 
you made that phone call. I don't need to put up 
with your crap, OK?...Bottom line, I'm doing nothing for you now.”
Indeed, she did end up losing her home.

4. Illegal Eviction in Los Angeles
Eduardo Acosta and his family had won their 
case—a judge ruled that Green Century Investment 
Group/IndyMac had no right to foreclose on the 
family, that they'd filed fraudulent paperwork.
A month later, the local sheriff posted an 
eviction notice to the family anyway.
This came on the heels of an audit of California 
foreclosures by the San Francisco County 
Recorder, which found that 99 percent of the 
foreclosures examined had “irregularities,” and 
there were clear violations of state law in 84 percent of them.
Acosta had applied for a mortgage modification 
after his payment shot up to $2,000 a month, his 
wife fell ill, and his monthly income plummeted. 
But while the bank reviewed his modification 
request, it also began foreclosure proceedings—a 
common enough process that it has a name, “dual 
tracking.” There's a bill in the Senate that aims 
to ban the practice and only allow lenders to 
proceed with foreclosure after working with 
borrowers. This process all-too-often allows for 
“accidental” foreclosures, where one side of the 
company forecloses on a home that another 
department is ostensibly working to help the family keep.
Occupy LA posted a call for help for the Acosta 
family after their eviction notice. “I’m sure 
there are a lot of people going through this,” 
Acosta said. “Let’s step up and help each other out.”
The Acostas are still in their home as of the 
latest report, but keeping them there has required a constant fight.

5. Sent to the Psychiatric Ward in Lodi, Wisconsin
An Associated Bank representative helped send 
Bill Schroeder to a psychiatric ward for 72 hours 
after a telephone argument over Schroeder's missed mortgage payments.
Schroeder told the Wisconsin State Journal that 
during their conversation the bank rep called him 
“worthless” and said the bank didn't care what 
happened to him as long as it got its money.
"I made an offhand response," Schroeder said. "I 
said, ‘Maybe I'll just go get my gun and shoot 
myself and you can have my life insurance.'"
They hung up and Schroeder made a trip to the 
grocery store. When he got back, a police car was 
in his driveway to take him to the hospital.
The bank rep was apparently slightly more 
concerned about Schroeder's health than he let on 
and had called the police. Yet it didn't seem to 
occur to the bank that perhaps the way to show 
real concern for homeowners' mental health would 
be to not make threats in the first place.
The Schroeder family wound up selling their home 
in a short sale, which left them still owing the 
bank $31,256 to make up the difference between 
their mortgage and the sale price of the home, 
which was down $66,000 after the bursting of the 
housing bubble. They estimated to the State 
Journal that they'll be making payments on a 
house they don't have anymore for the next seven years.

6. Disappearing Documents in Ohio
Gina Brooks and her husband applied for their 
first mortgage modification with Wells Fargo's 
ASC Mortgage servicer when they were only a 
couple of months behind on their payments. They 
were denied the first time and chose to go 
through a Chapter 13 bankruptcy—which would allow 
them to keep their home and keep paying their 
mortgage. “I had lived in this house for 14 
years,” she said. “I didn't want to lose my home.”
In July 2010, after the bankruptcy, she submitted 
another modification request and was again 
denied. The money she and her husband were paying 
on their mortgage alone was leaving them little 
to live on, and they finally decided to switch to 
a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would leave them 
without their home. In a last-ditch effort, she 
wrote to her mortgage company, and then called in when she didn't hear back.
“I was told at that time they had no record 
whatsoever of anything I had ever sent in since I 
started in 2009,” Brooks said. No record of her 
repeated denials, her requests, her bankruptcies. 
Nothing. No one was familiar with her case.
Brooks had already started packing her home when 
a friend suggested she contact her senator. 
Through an intervention by Sherrod Brown (D-OH)'s 
office, she was offered a full refinance on her 
home by Wells Fargo—but after two years of 
fighting with the lender, her refinance added 
$31,000 to her mortgage. Brooks said she's 
grateful to have her home, but frustrated to be 
paying interest on interest. “Why did it take me 
two years, two bankruptcies and all of this 
headache when they could've done it in one month?”

7. Possible Victory in Minneapolis
Monique White's home was the site of one of the 
first Occupy-related foreclosure defenses last 
November, when she refused to be bought off by 
Freddie Mac's “cash for keys” offer. That 
would've given her a small reimbursement for 
voluntarily giving up her home after it had been 
repossessed by U.S. Bank and sold to Freddie Mac—without her knowledge.
Neighborhoods Organizing for Change had already 
been working with White, but they reached out to 
Occupy and the group responded, sending occupiers 
to camp out on White's property to prevent eviction.
Now, thanks to tireless action by a team of 
lawyers, activists, and White herself—who 
traveled to U.S. Bank's shareholder meeting to 
personally ask the bank's CEO, Richard Davis, for 
help—she's got a tentative deal to modify her 
mortgage to allow her to stay in her home.
The Huffington Post reported:
It took US Bank a matter of days to come up with 
a principal reduction that allowed White to pay 
$686.36 a month to stay in her home. White, who 
works two part-time jobs and is in training for a 
full-time union position, said it was a little 
steep, but she could make it work.
Occupy Homes Minnesota activist Nick Espinosa 
told the Huffington Post, "It does show that when 
we shine a light on these cases and bring them to 
the public eye, that the bank is more than 
capable of negotiating -- even though they've 
said all along that that is not their 
responsibility. It's a huge victory, and it 
represents exactly the kind of deal that every 
homeowner in America should be getting from the banks."

Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a 
rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @sarahljaffe.
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that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that 
shall not be made known. What I tell you in 
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye 
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27

Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
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