Category: Real Estate

Well, Here’s One Announcement Obama Won’t Make at the SOTU

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He might be making some comments about working toward a sellout to settlement with the big banks and the mortgage services.

The reason that he won’t be touting the settlement is because there is no settlement:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 23, 2012

STATEMENT FROM [Iowa] ATTORNEY GENERAL TOM MILLER [Obama toady Lead AG in the negotiations]

(CHICAGO, Illinois) State Attorneys General from both parties, along with our federal partners, are today discussing the details of the progress we have made so far in settlement negotiations, including the terms we must still resolve. We have not yet reached an agreement with the nation’s five largest servicers, and we won’t reach a settlement any time this week.

As you can tell, I not a big fan of the settlement, and I think we can thank the people who have opposed the deal as currently structured, most notably Yves Smith, who has done yeoman work on teasing out the details and communicating what it all means for months, the recent condemnation of the deal by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is also significant. (And, as an FYI, everyone’s favorite right wing nuts, Judicial Watch, has filed suits to get related documents)

This resembles the groundswell that led to Obama vetoing HR 3808, which allowed some states shoddy documentation practices to go national.

With the increasing complaints from consumer activists about the settlement.

What are the problems?

Well on the micro level (courtesy of Yves Smith), it gives the banksters an incentive to pawn the losses off against the the mortgages that they recapitalized, avoiding the hit themselves, and giving it to pension funds, it incentivizes targeting the largest loans, and so benefits the richest, and there are no meaningful mechanisms to enforce good behavior from the mortgage servicers.

On the macro level, let’s roll Simon Johnson:

The financial sector has been the Obama administration’s Achilles’ heel. Despite coming to power in the middle of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression with a broad mandate for “change,” the administration has consistently deferred to big banks and done its best to keep them in business “as is.”

(Read the rest, really).

The real underlying message much of the disgust with how the government in general, and the Obama administration in particular function is that there has been a failure to stop the looting, and start prosecuting.

Where Am I Going to Go for Dipping Dots and Bubble Tea?

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This is a busy day at the mall!

It looks like the Owings Mall is going to be torn down.

Not surprising.  The mall has been in slow decline for some time, with at least one wing on the top floor shut down for the past two years.

Some of the anchor stores, as well as the theater, will remain, but it’s not going to be a classic mall anymore.

I’m not sure exactly why it failed, it’s located at the terminus of the Metro, and there is a rather large mixed used development in the area reaching completion.

Of note is that the operator of the mall, GGP, is in Bankruptcy, and is is owned by the Bucksbaum family, and Ann Bucksbaum Friedman is the wife of New York Times columnist (Who I would never call a schmuck because a schmuck has a head) Thomas Friedman.

I can’t avoid negative effects of this guy even if I never read his incoherent crap.

Another Stinker of a Bank Deal from

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Hoocoodanode that Biden’s Kid Would Be a Hero in All This?

Another day, another sell-out deal from Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and the Obama administration:

Talks between U.S. states and top banks over mortgage abuses are nearing agreement on a major sticking point that has bogged down settlement negotiations for more than a year.

…………

Under the proposed terms of the settlement — which could total $25 billion — banks would get broad legal immunity from state lawsuits in exchange for refinancing underwater loans, those mortgages where borrowers owe more than their homes are worth, the sources said.

…………

Banks have been holding out on a multi-billion-dollar settlement because they wanted broader legal immunity than state attorneys general were prepared to offer.

Originally, the states were only considering immunity for shortcuts taken during mortgage servicing and foreclosures, including the so-called “robo-signing” of documents to evict people behind on their mortgages.

In recent days, the state attorneys general agreed to release major banks from claims that they made legal errors when first originating the loans, such as approving loans for borrowers without verifying any income, according to two people familiar with the talks.

In exchange, banks would agree to refinance mortgages for borrowers who are current on their payments but owe more than their homes are currently worth, the sources said.

So, as Biden notes (see vid), they are getting a (pretty lame) deal from a contractor for bad gutters, and he demands to be cleared for the roof and the gutter they put in too.

But, as Yves Smith observes, the relief, such as it is, would only apply to non-securitized mortgages (about 20% of the mortgages), and the banks get to write the deal for the homeowners, meaning more booby traps for the the people who get “relief”, and probably a waiver of private liability.

BTW, this likely f%$#s the MBS investors, because without an official investigation of the securitization process, any potential private suit will be hamstrung.

Banks are Demolishing Homes Now

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Yes, it’s central Cleveland, but it’s happening elsewhere, and with a real turn around in house prices years away, this will spread:

Cleveland — The sight of excavators tearing down vacant buildings has become common in this foreclosure-ravaged city, where the housing crisis hit early and hard. But the story behind the recent wave of demolitions is novel — and cities around the country are taking notice.

A handful of the nation’s largest banks have begun giving away scores of properties that are abandoned or otherwise at risk of languishing indefinitely and further dragging down already depressed neighborhoods.

The banks have even been footing the bill for the demolitions — as much as $7,500 a pop. Four years into the housing crisis, the ongoing expense of upkeep and taxes, along with costly code violations and the price of marketing the properties, has saddled banks with a heavy burden. It often has become cheaper to knock down decaying homes no one wants.

The thing is that as bad as it is in the cities, when this happens in the suburbs, and the lifestyle in the far suburbs is not sustainable, there won’t be the any sort of useful application for the abandoned land, the article mentions land banks creating things like common spaces and community gardens, are just going to sit and decay.

It will be like some suburban Cyberpunk novel.

Finally!

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Pass the Popcorn

Even if the mortgage non-transfer transfers conducted through MERS fulfill the technical obligations required by existing real estate and trust law (they don’t), they still don’t excuse the illegal evasion of recording fees for local county clerks.

We’ve had a couple of smaller counties file suit, but now it’s Dallas, Texas, which turn over a huge rock, and reveal what is underneath:

Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc., along with Bank of America Corp., was sued by Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins over claims its mortgage-tracking system violates Texas law.

Merscorp Inc.’s MERS, which runs an electronic registry of mortgages, cheated Dallas County out of “tens of millions in uncollected filing fees,” Watkins said in a statement. MERS tracks servicing rights and ownership interests in mortgage loans on its registry, allowing banks to buy and sell loans without recording transfers with counties.

Watkins, in a complaint filed yesterday in state court in Dallas, claims MERS was established by banks including Bank of America to avoid paying filing fees, as well as to ease transfers of mortgages. The county asked the court to hold Bank of America liable as a shareholder of MERS and said the bank “knew or should have known” that the system would cause improper filing.

We are talking billions, if not tens of billions of dollars in fees that were illegally evaded by the banks, and Dallas County is big enough that the banks can’t afford to settle to make the problem go away.

My heart bleeds for these ratf%$#s.

Yes, that Acquisition of Countrywide was So Good for BoA

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I probably haven’t been writing about this as much as I should, but it’s beginning to look like Bank of America’s ill-advised takeover of Countrywide Financial, and it’s portfolio of fraudulent mortgages, is beginning to cause some real problems.

Basically, the sweetheart deal that they negotiated with the trustee, Bank of New York Mellon, would have them paying out pennies on the dollar for misrepresented and mis-documented mortgages.

First, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opposed the settlement saying that it was unfair to investors.

Of course, the unfairness was a feature, not a bug, since BNY Mellon is desperate to reduce its exposure from their deliberate lack of due diligence.

Then, the FDIC opposed the deal, saying that they did not have enough information to evaluate the deal on its merits.

And if we know anything about the world of securitized mortgages and trusts, we know that more information means more bad news, as we have seen every time another rock gets overturned.

Well, now we have individual homeowners filing to block the settlement, because, as a sop to investors, the deal would have established a “rocket docket” for foreclosures:

Lawyers for the National Consumer Law Center said in a report prepared as part of the case that the proposed settlement “will speed up foreclosures, perpetuate existing servicing abuses in the system, and undermine federal programs designed to stabilize the housing market.”

Bank of America had hoped the $8.5 billion settlement would finally put much of this potential liability behind it, but the challenges have raised investor fears that the ultimate cost of the settlement could rise sharply. Anxiety about the extent of Bank of America’s legal woes has also weighed on the bank’s stock, with some estimates suggesting the ultimate cost could be in the tens of billions.

First, I think that the penalties, including tax penalties for improperly conveying the mortgages to the trust, are almost certainly in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and second, when an $8.5 billion payout is a sweetheart deal, it means that the banks are too big.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot: The FHFA filed a similar objection to the FDIC’s and U.S. Bancorp is suing to get BOA to buyback the mortgages in yet another trust.

BoA would be, in a fair and just world, toast, and its executives would be facing criminal investigations.

In this world, however, it means that Obama and Geithner and Bernanke will be setting up someway to bail them out in order to insure executive bonuses “protect the banking system” with our money.

H/t Naked capitalism.

On edit:

It looks like the Nevada is claimed that BoA reneged on its loan modification agreement with the state, and so they are filing to abrogate the agreement so that they can sue:

The attorney general of Nevada is accusing Bank of America of repeatedly violating a broad loan modification agreement it struck with state officials in October 2008 and is seeking to rip up the deal so that the state can proceed with a suit against the bank over allegations of deceptive lending, marketing and loan servicing practices.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in United States District Court in Reno, Catherine Cortez Masto, the Nevada attorney general, asked a judge for permission to end Nevada’s participation in the settlement agreement. This would allow her to sue the bank over what the complaint says were dubious practices uncovered by her office in an investigation that began in 2009.
In her filing, Ms. Masto contends that Bank of America raised interest rates on troubled borrowers when modifying their loans even though the bank had promised in the settlement to lower them. The bank also failed to provide loan modifications to qualified homeowners as required under the deal, improperly proceeded with foreclosures even as borrowers’ modification requests were pending and failed to meet the settlement’s 60-day requirement on granting new loan terms, instead allowing months and in some cases more than a year to go by with no resolution, the filing says.
The complaint says such practices violated an agreement Bank of America reached in the fall of 2008 with several states and later, in 2009, with Nevada, to settle lawsuits that accused its Countrywide unit of predatory lending. As the credit crisis grew, the settlement was heralded as a victory by state offices eager to help keep troubled borrowers in their homes and reduce their costs. Bank of America set aside $8.4 billion in the deal and agreed to help 400,000 troubled borrowers with loan modifications and other financial relief, such as lowering interest rates on mortgages.

I wish that I knew of a way to go short on the bad news piling up, and long on the eventual bailout.

It Looks Like the 50-State Foreclosure Fraud Coverup May be Unraveling

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First, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said yesterday she will not release banks from liability incurred through fraudulent paperwork:

Three states conducting their own probes of residential mortgage practices are resisting broad liability releases sought by banks to settle a nationwide foreclosure investigation.

The banks, in settlement talks with state and federal officials, are seeking releases that would protect them from future legal liabilities. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said yesterday she won’t endorse a deal that includes certain releases. New York and Delaware have raised similar concerns over terms of a possible deal.

All three states are conducting investigations tied to mortgage operations of banks. Delaware and Massachusetts officials say a settlement shouldn’t release banks from some claims, including those related to bundling mortgages into securities, while the inquiries continue.

“We’re not prepared to do a broad liability release for either securitization issues or for MERS until we’ve completed that piece of investigation,” Coakley said in a telephone interview yesterday. Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc., or MERS, is a national mortgage database used by banks.

Basically, Coakley is saying that if there is a release on securitization fraud, she will not sign onto the deal, and the banks know that if they are ever effectively pursued on securitization fraud, they are dead, so no deal.

To the rest of the AGs, get off your ass, and convene a grand jury, the rest of the AGs, and stop letting yourself get strong-armed by Obama, Holder, and company to go easy on the banks.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

But of Course, It’s Florida…

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Attourneys in the Florida Attorney General’s office were forced to resign with no notice or any opportunity to communicate what they had found:

A lead foreclosure fraud investigator for the state said she and a colleague were forced to resign from the Florida attorney general’s office, unexpectedly ending their nearly yearlong pursuit to hold law firms and banks accountable.

Former Assistant Attorney General Theresa Edwards and colleague June Clarkson had been investigating the state’s so-called “foreclosure mills,” uncovering evidence of legal malpractice that also implicated banks and loan serv­icers.

Despite positive performance evaluations, Edwards said the two were told during a meeting with their supervisor in late May to give up their jobs voluntarily or be let go. Edwards said no reason was given for the move.

“It all happened very abruptly,” said Edwards, who had worked in the attorney general’s office for about three years.

The foreclosure investigations were launched under former Attorney General Bill McCollum, but Edwards said she sensed changes were coming under Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“I think they wanted to put people in there that were more in line with their thinking,” Edwards said.

Bondi’s press secretary said Tuesday that foreclosure investigations are still open and are being personally led or supervised by Division Director Richard Lawson.

Yeah sure. Rick Scott is determined to get to the bottom of rich lawyers cheating ordinary people.

This is What Qualifies for Good Economic News

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The fact that homer prices in May fell year over year, but they rose month to month:

Finally, perhaps some good news on housing values.

On Tuesday, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, a closely watched measure of home prices, posted a rise for April, the first in eight months.

The index increased 0.7 percent, reflecting increases in prices in 13 of the 20 cities tracked. That compared with a 0.8 percent decline in March, when the index hit a new low.

But analysts said it was unclear that a sustained rebound in the housing market was under way, noting that sales were typically stronger in the spring.

David M. Blitzer, the chairman of the index committee at S.& P. Indices, called the April increase a welcome shift from previous months. “However, the seasonally adjusted numbers show that much of the improvement reflects the beginning of the spring-summer home buying season,” he added in a statement. “It is much too early to tell if this is a turning point or simply due to some warmer weather.”

It’s the warmer weather, but we have papers trumpeting this because they are desperately trying to pander to your realtors who buy ads in your paper.

The fact that home prices rose a bit in April relative to March isn’t news.

Thing about it: The last time home prices rose in the Case-Shiller index was 8 months ago, and 8 months back from April is …… August …… Naah, nothing seasonal here.

Wanker of the Day

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David Streitfeld, a reporter for the New York Times just released an article
claiming a 62 year backlog of foreclosures.

The problem is that the story is based on fairly bogus stats, and the source of the stats, and for that matter, the source of pretty much the entire story, is Lender Processing Services (LPS), which is currently the target of multiple lawsuits, for defrauding investors, and (literally!!!!) having a price sheet on the web for forged documents through its DocX subsidiary (some background here)

So, this guy took a press release from what is allegedly one of the most corrupt and criminal organizations involved in the mortgage mess and phoned in an article.

Time for a blogger ethics panel.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

2 Years Too Late, Timmeh

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So, the US Treasury is finally taking action against banks who have not engaged in HAMP in good faith:

As the nation’s housing market continues to teeter, the Treasury Department on Thursday penalized three of the nation’s largest banks for subpar performance in administrating a government-sponsored program to modify mortgage loans for distressed homeowners.

As part of a new assessment of mortgage servicers, Treasury officials said they would withhold incentive payments for the three banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — until the problems are resolved. At that point, those payments would be made, a Treasury spokeswoman said.

In May, the three banks received $24 million in incentives as part of the modification program.

The Treasury Department has previously withheld payments from mortgage servicers, but Thursday’s action focused on some of the biggest players in the program. Called the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, it is voluntary for mortgage servicers. Nearly all of the nation’s largest banks have signed contracts to participate.

Only, as Yves Smith observes, this is not accountability, it’s accountability theater, from the folks who so f%$#ed up HANP so badly that, “HAMP was so clearly a disaster that Treasury Department officials didn’t try very hard to defend it in a meeting with bloggers that I [Yves Smith] participated in last August. The best they could do was claim that it helped the housing market by spreading out foreclosures over a long time period,” so in this bit of atmospherics, the banks still get their money, they just won’t get it today.

Someone must have informed Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner that even if Barack Obama would never fire him,* if the voters fire Obama, he’s still out of job.

*This fact that Geithner is unfirable makes a pretty argument against a 2nd Obama term.†
†We now have revelations that Larry Summers was more on the ball than he.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And the initial claims numbers show no signs of recovery in the job market, with initial claims remaining excessively high, at 422,000, though the 4-week moving average did fall by 14K to 425,500, and continuing and emergency/extended claims were basically flat.

So, the employment numbers are crap, and stuck in a no-recovery “sweet spot,” and it looks like the real estate market is still crashing, a rebound in manufacturing would take years for the capital to be assembled and constructed, and we still have Wall Street sitting athwart our economy, extracting its unearned vigorish that saps both resources and intellect from productive activity.

Here Is a Shocker

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The Registrar of Deeds for Guilford County, North Carolina, Greensboro and environs, after hearing horror stories about fraudulent loans, decided to go through his own deeds, and went through all the deeds transferred from 2006 to 2010.

The results? That in a cursory examination, well over half of the deeds were in some manner fraudulent:

But Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, a county of about 465,000 in the center of the state (the largest city is Greensboro), decided to survey all the mortgage documents submitted to his office by DocX, a notorious “mortgage mill” that processes documents on behalf of lenders, between August 2006 and April 2010. He was inspired by a 60 Minutes investigation revealing numerous forgeries, backdating, and other false information on mortgage documents. “When I saw that [story], I was basically on fire,” Thigpen says. “‘I know this material is in my office, I’ve got to find it, I’ve got to get it out.'”

Out of the 6,100 documents Thigpen examined, 4,500 showed signature irregularities. The name of one DocX employee, Linda Green, who was acting as a vice president for several major banks, was forged 15 different ways on the Guilford County documents, rendering them invalid. Thigpen’s investigation was one of the first systematic assessments of mortgage document fraud in the entire country, certainly more robust than anything conducted by state and federal regulators.

Thigpen, as well as his Essex County equivalent John O’Brien, have been making as much of a stink as they can about this, they have asked the Iowa Attorney General, Tom Miller, to hold off on his proposed national settlement pending a real investigation. (some older posts here)

That would be the right thing to do, of course, but considering the fact that Miller is angling for some sort of position in the Obama administration, and the Obama administration is as interested in pursuing the banks for wrong doing as they are in pursuing Dick Cheney for outing a CIA agent, I don’t expect that there will ever be a meaningful investigation of Bankster wrongdoing.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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Initial claims are out and they are better, but still not enough to constitute a recovery in the job market.

Initial claims were at 403,000, still above the roughly 375K required for a meager recovery, while the less volatile 4 week moving average climbed to a 7 month high.

In the longer time views, while continuing claims fell, extended and emergency claims rose.

These are awful numbers, and Barack Obama has to be thanking his lucky stars about what a clown show the Republican Presidential campaign has become, because there were also a whole passel of truly anemic economic metrics released today, with the Philadephia Fed survey, the Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators, and existing home sales disappointing.

2 Years???? 2 F%$#ing Years?!?!?!?

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Yep, it’s that misbegotten bastard child of Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Barack Obama*, the Home Affordable Mortgage Program, HAMP, where the Treasury has finally decided to require a single point of contact for homeowners participating in the program:

Mortgage servicers must provide a single relationship manager to borrowers being evaluated for a Home Affordable Modification Program trial by Sept. 1, according to guidance released by the Treasury Department Wednesday.

The guideline is required of the 20 largest servicers participating in HAMP, and it is one of the largest adjustments to the program since its inception in March 2009. Since then, more than 670,000 borrowers received a permanent loan modification, and more than 1.8 million trials have been extended.

“Over the past two years, two of the biggest complaints we received from borrowers were servicers are losing documents and they can’t connect with anybody who can actually track them down. Every time they call they can’t get a hold of someone with access to their case,” Laurie Maggiano, director of policy at the Treasury’s homeownership preservation office, said in an interview with HousingWire Wednesday.

The relationship manager must be an employee of the bank and cannot be a contractor. This manager will be assigned when the servicer makes successful contact with the delinquent borrower. The borrower must meet the initial criteria of the program, such as owner-occupancy and a 31% debt-to-income ratio.

The program has been in place for about 2 years, and since day 1, the complaints have been about no one being a point of contact, meaning that you had repeatedly lost paperwork, changing conditions, dual tracking, where when you were talking with one bankster, another was in the process of foreclosing, etc.

People have been screaming about this.

The press has been screaming about this.

Congress has been screaming about this.

But nothing was done until the 2012 election loomed, because, after all, this was not a program to help people, it was a program to cheat people, and help the banks.

*Who knew that bad programs were conceived by three beings?  For the rest of nature, it’s either parthenogenesis (Amoeba, lobbyists) or some sort of sexual reproduction involving only two participants. There are echos here of the Asimov novel The Gods Themselves.

Mortgage Settlement Talks Bifurcate

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The Feds and the state Attorneys General have separated their settlement talks with mortgage servicers and banks:

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said the reported side settlement between mortgage servicers and federal regulators will in no way affect the ongoing investigation he is leading along with 49 other state attorneys general.

Several media outlets are reporting that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Reserve are engaging in talks with mortgage servicers and that agreements could be signed as early as next week.

“A separate settlement by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will not affect our investigation,” Miller said in a statement. “The settlement neither preempts, nor impacts our efforts. State attorneys general will continue to work together unabated with a broad coalition of federal partners.”

My guess here is that, notwithstanding AG Miller’s attempt to come up with a weak deal, see Yves Smith’s coverage for more information, is that the OCC’s proposed deal is too weak for even him to follow up on.

Additionally, they may be attempting to distance themselves from the manufactured sh%$ storm about Elizabeth Warren advising them.

Of course, if you are an optimist about this, and I am not, it could be that the AGs realized that the two efforts were incompatible, since a federal settlement is primarily about looking at future behavior, while the Attorneys General are charged with investigating and pursuing prior and ongoing wrongdoing.

My guess is that there is some political heat being generated, both from the teabaggers who are crying, “leave Britney the big banks alone,” and people interested in property rights and the rule of law, who want criminal prosecutions of what is fraud and theft an an almost unimaginable scale.

H/t Yves Smith.

Hoo Boy!

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One of the things that gets turned off if there is a government shutdown is FHA loans:

I was hoping not to have to write this particular piece, but it seems I may have no choice, so here we go with housing.

What happens to today’s housing market without FHA loans?

Right now FHA loans are about 20 percent of the overall mortgage market (purchases and refis) and 40 percent of purchase applications.

Compare that to around 11 percent of the overall market during the last shutdown in 1995. For the nation’s big public home builders, it’s far more of an impact, according to analysts. 

This basically means that the housing market shuts down for the duration, because if 40% of home buyers can’t buy, the remainder will be able to extract even more in the way of lower house prices.

House prices have fallen 7 straight months, but prices are sticky in the short term, so you will have the housing market freeze.

Economics Update

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It’s Jobless Thursday, and initial unemployment claims fell by 10,000 to 382,000, with the 4-week moving average of initial claims, continuing claims, and emergency claims falling as well.

When juxtaposed with stronger than expected retail sales figures for March, the economic news is generally pertty good, though the fact that home prices continue to crater, falling for the 7th straight month, indicates that real estate is not done with its correction.

Another Day, Another Phony Foreclosure Fraud Settlement

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In this case, it’s the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson, who has agreed to pay a $2 million settlement to resolve charges of fraud:

A Florida law firm agreed Friday to pay the state $2 million in penalties for allegedly mishandling foreclosures — the first deal of its kind since the uproar over the issue began last fall.

The Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson was among the prominent law firms investigated by state authorities after major lenders, including Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase, admitted last fall that their employees had “robo-signed” foreclosure cases without reading them and improperly notarized some documents.

Investigations into these practices are being conducted on several parallel tracks. Besides investigations by various states, federal regulators are conducting a review of national banks. Attorneys general from 50 states have joined with the Obama administration to try to negotiate a broader settlement with the mortgage industry.

………

They added that their foreclosure notices were not served properly. In some cases, relatives with no stake in the process were served notices and the homeowners were billed to cover the cost of those actions.

The settlement does not include any admission of guilt by the law firm.

You know, after pulling this kind of sh%$ routinely, I would think that they should:

  • Pay more than the cost of a dozen of the houses that they have foreclosed on.
  • Have the state bar looking at pulling his law licence.
  • Have the Attorney General looking at throwing his ass in jail.

But I guess I am just a rube for believing that the rule of law and property rights meaning anything at all.