Where’s The Pea?
MSNBC has an interesting piece on April Charney, a Jacksonville Legal Aid attorney who deals with foreclosures
“You ever look into a place where snakes hang out?” she asks in the middle of a conversation about the loan officers, appraisers, investment bankers, attorneys and others that she believes are responsible for the nation’s worsening financial crisis. “That’s what I see here. They’re writhing and oozing and morphing into creepy stuff with slime all over it.”
Then in her quiet, gentle drawl — the kind of voice that could get you invited to afternoon drinks on the finest porches in South Florida, where she grew up — she leans forward and says quite earnestly, “Not to discredit snakes or anything.”
A genuine “bless their hearts” moment from a woman who is saving people’s homes by requiring that those who are foreclosing on them obey the law.
The one point that sort of startled me in the piece, although it should have been apparent if I had thought the mess through, are people who have resolved a foreclosure and then are faced with foreclosure again from a different plaintiff. The way the financial industry has been passing mortgages around, it isn’t always clear who owns them, and that is a big reason Ms Charney has been so successful in defending home owners – foreclosure can only be initiated by the holder of the actual mortgage on the property.
People who get in trouble can’t possibly get out if they don’t know who to talk to, which shell the mortgage is under.
6 comments
Real Estate seems to be where all those bad developers went from the .com bust. I can’t stand them, and if those bastards go broke, I won’t miss them.
I just wonder what area those losers will hop to next. Right Wing punditry seems to be taken.
Real Estate law is the oldest part of English common law, and the forms, if you read them, would seem to have been written before the Tudors. The basic rules are found on clay tablets in cuneiform and scratched on mammoth tusks. Screwing up a deed or mortgage is almost impossible to do, and you start learning this stuff in the first year of law school.
They have been getting away with this crap because no one could conceive of anyone doing it wrong, it’s like forgetting how to breathe.
I think we had better keep an eye on infrastructure repair and “green energy”, because those will probably be the growth industries set for the next bubble.
Ah yes — “KB&R, your infrastructure specialists!! We do it for cost-plus!” and “Halliburton — your green future” Bet?
Surely, you jest. Scorpio, bet against those ghouls trying to get back on the government payroll? And they will use their “experience” in Iraq as part of their proposals, count on it.
Ha. Good one for her. I’m glad she added the part of not discrediting snakes. Snakes are quite nice little creatures. They ususally stay where they belong. The people going out into their habitat are the ones intruding.
It’s bad enough to be faced with losing your home, but a lot of the time the people foreclosing aren’t doing it legally, and they are not actually your creditors.