Is A Crime Unpunished Not Really A Crime? Take The Disgraceful And Illegal Foreclosures Against Military Families

A week or so ago we featured the Doobie Brothers' complaint about banksters illegally foreclosing on active duty service members. The law is very clear-- each illegal foreclosure by J.P.MorganChase should have yielded one year in prison. Instead J.P.MorganChase said, "Oops; so sorry" and got off scott free-- no jail, just a slap on the wrist. Looks like the banksters at Well Fargo took this as a green light for them to start foreclosing on military families too.

While they are fighting for our nation overseas, some military personnel are losing their houses to foreclosure here at home.

In the thick of battle, in the heat of the fight, it's the last thing a GI should have to worry about.  While Coast Guardsman Keith Johnson was fighting for our country overseas, he was losing a battle here at home, for his home.  

A battle, he claims, he had no idea was being waged until the moment he got back and spoke to his wife.

"It just boggled my mind. I got back and she said 'the house is basically foreclosed' and I was like 'What do you mean?'" Johnson says.

At the same time, Johnson and his wife Alysia were negotiating with their lender, Wells Fargo, to modify the mortgage on their Clearwater home, the bank's lawyers were foreclosing on the property, getting a summary judgment, and auctioning it off.

That happens fairly often.  Banks negotiate loan modifications at the same time they move to foreclose. The difference here is that Johnson says no one ever informed him the bank was foreclosing.

If that's true, it would be an apparent violation of a federal law specifically designed to protect active duty military personnel.

The Servicemember Civil Relief Act requires active duty soldiers be informed of civil actions like foreclosure, and allows them to delay the process until they are home to defend themselves.

Attorney John Odom is a nationally known expert on the act, and says it also protects soldiers against default judgments because, "Active duty personnel are not free to come and go as they might need to defend themselves," Odom tells us.

The I-Team has uncovered case after case in the Tampa area, around Florida, and the nation where banks have foreclosed on the homes of active duty military personnel.

...“They really need to get themselves under control," said Johnson, referring to the banks. 

"They are really just bullying because they can."

And they can because they don't get punished for it. Our prisons are full and overflowing with every kind of criminal except the ones who have systematically stolen billions of dollars; they always seem to get away with it. I understand how that happens when Republicans are in control; it's what their party is all about. But what good are the Democrats if they're playing the same games?

“Forgive me,” began Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job, while accepting his 2011 Oscar for best documentary. “I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”

The audience erupted in applause.

Ferguson isn’t the first to express outrage over the lack of criminal cases to spring from the financial crisis, and his speech triggered a wave of similarly prosecutorial sentiments, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in May 16 issue.

Since that February night, financial journalists, bloggers and who knows how many dinner party guests have debated the trillion-dollar question: When will a Wall Street executive be sent to jail?

There are those who have implied that prosecutors are either too cozy with Wall Street or too incompetent to bring cases to court.

Thus, in a measured piece that assessed the guilt of various financial executives, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera lamented that “Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks... aren’t even on Justice’s radar screen.”

A news story in the Times about a mortgage executive who was convicted of criminal fraud observed, “The Justice Department has yet to bring charges against an executive who ran a major Wall Street firm leading up to the disaster.”

In the same dispassionate tone, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered chimed in, “Some of the most publicly reviled figures in the mortgage mess won’t face any public accounting.”

New York magazine saw fit to print the estimable opinion of Bernie Madoff, who observed that the dearth of criminal convictions is “unbelievable.” Rolling Stone, which has been beating this drum the longest and with the heaviest hand, reductively asked, Why isn’t Wall Street in jail?

Taken from the top, these sentiments imply that the financial crisis was caused by fraud; that people who take big risks should be subject to a criminal investigation; that executives of large financial firms should be criminal suspects after a crash; that public revulsion indicates likely culpability; that it is inconceivable (to Madoff, anyway) that people could lose so much money absent a conspiracy; and that Wall Street bears collective guilt for which a large part of it should be incarcerated.

The swinish Wall Street apologist who wrote the piece then goes on the claim that because there have been no criminal prosecutions, they were probably no crimes. That's part of the fabric of our political system. Those who aided and abetted the Nazis before, during and after World War II-- including J.P. Morgan, Rockefellers, Bushs, duPonts, Fords, the Dulles Brothers-- were never punished and went on to continue pushing dangerous, anti-American fascist agendas for decades unmolested. Those agendas are now, basically, the platform of the Republican Party. Big Business and Big Banks ripping off the public are part of the Republican platform as well.



UPDATE: Of Course, The Banksters Aren't ONLY Ripping Off Military Families

Anyone's family is a target for their greed and corruption. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general examined Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial and found them all to be defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans.

The audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes that sold for less than the outstanding loan balance using defective and faulty documents.