About Me 0046: foreclosure victims

Via David Dayen, at least one federal regulator wants to do something about the foreclosure crisis. Federal Deposit Insurance Commission Chair Sheila Bear has proposed implementing rigid standards for mortgage services in the financial reform regulatory rulemaking. She's advocating the idea of a claims commission for homeowners.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair wants a foreclosure claims commission set up, similar to the one established during the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico last year, to help homeowners victimized by improper foreclosures....

Lenders and servicers have restarted foreclosures from the robo-signing scandal and have begun refiling thousands of affidavits. Chase said it would mail out $2 million in refunds to those families.

But Bair wants to consider more in compensation and in new regulation.

"The mortgage servicing industry is fundamentally flawed and in desperate need of reform. It does not provide significant incentives to provide borrowers enough loss mitigation needs," Bair said.

She added that some servicers have become too big to succeed. Since 2000, the five largest servicers grew their market share from 32% to more than 60% today, Bair said, adding that these companies were either incapable of or reluctant to commit the resources necessary to implement effective loss mitigation practices.

As the 50 state attorneys general continue their investigation into the servicing industry, Iowa AG Tom Miller has said a fund to compensate borrowers victimized by robo-signers is on the table, but not necessarily pending.

It's good as far as it goes for those who've already been victimized by the mortgage servicing industry, but there's an immediate need to stop these unwarranted foreclosures and prevent their being further victims. Dday:

A nationwide compensation fund is fine, but in the end it’ll probably end up as just a payoff, the cost of doing business for the banks. You have to add to that real modifications with principal reductions, to reset the entire housing market and stabilize it. And you have to provide consequences for illegal behavior, which is in the background of virtually every foreclosure action over the past several years. Judge Arthur Schack is taking on foreclosure lawyers because they are lying in his court and breaking the law. The remedy for that is to throw those people in jail, and that needs to go all the way to the top. “I’m not going after lawyers, I’m out to do justice,” Judge Schack said. “We have something called due process of the law.” And there’s no justice without actual sanctions for criminal behavior. “We’re not Animal House,” concluded Judge Schack. “Some animals, like banks, are not more equal than others, to bring George Orwell into this.” It was Animal Farm, but have I mentioned that I love Judge Schack?

It's a start, and a good thing that someone in the administration is talking about doing something, anything on this issue. But it is just a start.

Any cop can tell you whodunnit but it takes a supercop to tell you What It All Means about our political culture. A nagging question: Should supercop maybe have figured out that Loughner was a menace before he gunned down six people outside a Safeway? Remember, this is a guy who was so palpably disturbed that more than one of his classmates told their professor that they feared for their lives. He had five separate run-ins with the campus police at his community college, and as Moe Lane helpfully notes, at some point Dupnik himself learned that Loughner had made death threats — and they weren’t threats to Gabby Giffords. When he learned of those threats (perhaps only after the shootings?) and whether they fell under his jurisdiction are the subjects of inquiry going forward, provided any reporter can tear himself away from worrying about tea partiers to look into this.

In that vein, we’re getting lots of e-mails about this post, but I’m unfamiliar with the site and can’t vouch for its credibility. Under those circumstances I’d normally pass on it, but since America’s new standard of journalism requires no supporting evidence whatsoever before tossing an assertion into the news stream, here you go. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. The important thing is, does it serve your political agenda?

Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County. Amy Loughner is a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation. My sympathies and my heart goes out to her and the rest of Mr. Loughner’s family. This tragedy must be tearing them up inside wondering if they had done the right things in trying to manage Jared’s obvious mental instability.

Every victim of his threats previously must also be wondering if this tragedy could have been prevented if they had been more aggressive in pursuing charges against Mr. Loughner. Perhaps with a felony conviction he would never have been able to lawfully by the Glock 9mm Model 19 that he used to strike down the lives of six people and decimate 14 more.

I don’t know how the author claims to know all that, but then I don’t know how the left claims to know that Loughner was under the evil spell of Palin’s midterms crosshairs map either. For what it’s worth, a top mental health official in Tucson says his department had no knowledge of Loughner before Saturday:

“To the best of our knowledge, he was never and is currently not enrolled in our system,” said Neal Cash, president of the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, the organization that provides mental health services to Tucson and Pima County for the state.

The majority of the people they serve are on Medicare, Cash said, but anyone diagnosed with a serious mental illness would be in their system and eligible for services. Despite severe cutbacks in the state mental health budget as a result of the foreclosure crisis and recession – Cash estimates around $50 million has been cut in the last two fiscal years – he said that no one diagnosed seriously mentally ill has been turned down for services.

Arizona has what is considered one of the most progressive mental health laws in the country. Any person, including any of the students in Loughner’s classes who exchanged worried emails about his strange actions or any of his teachers who sought to have him removed or who wanted him to receive treatment, could have petitioned the court to have him evaluated for mental illness.

I can understand classmates not wanting to risk Loughner’s wrath by reporting him, but if — if — Dupnik knew he was disturbed, why didn’t he? Worth thinking about — but first, let’s get back to blaming Sarah Palin. Click the image to watch.

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Monday, January 24, 2011

foreclosure victims

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