Maybe someone should send Rove a copy of the movie “Inside Job”??

Any time Rove speaks he has an agenda and it certainly isn’t in favor of America’s citizens.

The banks have committed fraud everyway possible in this mortgage fiasco and the really bad thing is they are still doing it! Not one of these revelations has slowed them down one bit. They are still buying up mortgage bundles and nobody knows how much they are paying for them.

Now, lets look at this from a business perspective and say if I were to buy a block of mortgages from a servicer would I pay full price for each one? HELL NO! I’d get myself the cheapest mass product buy deal possible. In fact, whatever is actual prinicipal on the loan outside years of interest may only be 150K or less on the existing loan. So, the mortgage servicer has a loan on the books for 225K, most of which is interest amortorized for 30 years and the real prinicple is only 150K. I would get a principle reduction on the buy amount and still hold the homebuyer accountable for the full amount they agreed on when they signed the original documents. Oh yeah, I don’t care if they don’t sign a new agreement with me cause the DOJ will never come after me. I also don’t care that America has already paid for these mortgages three times in the TARP programs, I’m still gonna fleece the homebuyer and I will refuse to negotiate down the priniple. In fact, if I find out that the homebuyer is unemployed and may not be able to pay that big mortgage I’ll just go ahead and foreclose on them. I don’t care if hubby, wife, and two little kids have to live in their cars. I don’t care if I ruin their credit for life or longer.

Nope, it’s all about money and the banks getting paid for one home at least 7, yes SEVEN times!

Rove’s a tool and, as I would expect, always looking out for Rove. Saying this first: if you click Marcy’s link you end up on WSJ’s page with a 2 paragraph teaser from his “opinion” but if you go to Turd Blossom’s website he gives you the whole thing for free, wherein he bitches about people getting something for nothing.

It’s dog-whistle racial code speak. The dishonest money grabbing black man in the “People’s House” is fleecing banks for a reparations give back-vote buying-and bank robbing for cronies….the Tea Party already understands what synonyms are used for “cadillac queen”,… so ’80’s …

Sex, drugs, rock & roll destroyed the catholic church, Santorum says McCain doesn’t understand torture, Newt’s history lessons, Karl – “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

What idiots, sadly they have a following who don’t need no stinkin’ paper’s to vote.

Yves Smith weighed in on this a bit in her latest post on nakedcapitalism.com (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/05/former-lps-employees-allege-30-to-78-error-rate-in-borrower-mortgage-records-contradicting-bankerregulator-cover-up.html) and noted that she’s been told that rove doesn’t do anything unless he’s paid. That makes sense to me.

Z

But again, why now? Shouldn’t Rove and the banks be a lot more worried about AG Eric Schneiderman’s investigation of securitization? Shouldn’t they be more worried about individual register of deeds demonstrating that most titles in this country are now corrupted? Shouldn’t they worry about suits around the country that may reveal what we all know–that the banks would be lucky to get off with a $20 billion settlement?

Marcy, I suspect that Rove is trying to cover up something truly sinister here.

I read Yves daily these days, and wow –she’s had some mind-blowing details about the levels of fraud involved in these mortgage docs. No novelist could dream up these things and build a credible story – the thing is so outrageous it is just stupifying.

Lender Processing Services, which someone on this thread linked to over at Yves’ NakedCapitalism, didn’t even have solid password protection on their system (!).
Yes, I did type that correctly.
A huge database system — with NO effective password controls.
It’s simply unbelievable. No viable business could function with the processes that Yves describes.

(Don’t let MadDogs, WmOckham, randiego, JohnLopresti, PJEvans, or a host of other eWheelies know the details about LPS — it’s simply mind-boggling (!)) It truly is more bizarre than fiction; if it were a novel, I would not believe it.

Someday, I’d love to see WIRED’s DangerRoom describe the unbelievably fraudulent ediface called ‘MERS,’ along with LPS. The problems involved in their processes and procedures simply can’t be explained as ‘incompetence’.
To me, it has the appearance of ‘plausible deniability’: whoever set up LPS and MERS wanted to make the fraud appear to be simple incompetence. But anyone who sets up a database system without access control — well, to me, that’s not ‘incompetence’, that is c-r-i-m-i-n-a-l.

I sometimes have to listen to Yves’ Odiego feeds *twice* because I can’t believe my ears the first time. The fact that people were fired for **questioning** the system, rather than fixing it, is deeply suspicious.

I now take you back to some of masaccio’s old posts about the mortgage mess, as well as what Yves has covered.

As I piece things together, the 50 AG’s finally started to realize that AG Miller of Iowa, the ostensible lead AG on this $20 billion settlement, is playing footsie with the banksters and Wall Street. Now, if you are in Nevada, or California, or Washington, or any number of states with city and county budgets in dire straits because of the mortgage mess, you can forget all about any hope of re-election if you side with Miller’s bogus bullshit deal that he’s cut with the banksters.

And apparently, the banks didn’t cut a deal early on because they figured that they could get a better deal.

Move back farther in time: this whole ‘meltdown’, as near as I can fathom, is a system of insurance fraud *built over and on top of* rampant mortgage fraud.
So first, you make a ton of fraudulent mortgages.
Then, you make a shitload of bets that those mortgages are going to go bust — a ‘bet’ you can’t possibly lose. So you collect from AIG (aka, ‘the taxpaying minions’). And you have Hank Paulson tell the Congress in Sept 2008, “here’s your 3-page edict and don’t ever ask any questions of ANYONE. This is a holdup, a stickup. Keep your mouths shut and hand over the money, don’t ask any questions. Ever.”

Well, prior to that at least from 2000, the homebuilders, the realtors, and the mortgage bankers had been feeding GOP coffers. At least in my local region, quite a few of those folks overlapped with the evangelical churches — not all, but plenty of them did. Those were the very people funding the GOP ‘ownership society’, which enlarged the FIRE section at the expense of the real, productive economy.

It generated mortgages, credit card debt, and illusions.
It did not generate genuine, productive capacity.

To generate illusions on that scale, you need — apparently — a fair amount of fraud. The best thing that I’ve seen cover this aspect is Hudson’s “The Monsters”, which was an FDL Book Salon selection. (He offers detailed, specific instances of fraud that were viewed as ‘normal’ — an Ameriquest office where the copy machine, the scissors and pens used to forge signatures on mortgage docs was referred to as ‘the art department’).

K-k-k-k-karl Rove had to have been complicit in the money stream that built the politics that protected this disaster, and the fraudsters were his ‘clients’. At all levels: city, state, and federal.

Note also that a lot of legislative and agency changes occurred while the GOP controlled the Senate and House Banking Committees and pushed through changes that enabled banks to ‘deregulate’. (Sen Richard Shelby was at the helm, which will not surprise anyone around here.)

So I suspect that Rove is covering his own ass, the asses of his clients, and that there must be something brewing in the background that none of us is aware of — yet.

For the banks to use Rove is so stupid that it makes me grin ;-))
If they’d contracted Voldemort or Dick Cheney, they could hardly have made a clumsier move — this just tickles my funny bone ;-))

Sorry about the too-long comment, but I take this Rovian weirdness as a symptom that something creepy is afoot.

The criminality has to go miles deep, surely involves tax havens and probably the Mafia at some point, and at some point with that much fraud there’s going to be a point at which the dam no longer holds. At this point, it appears that Rove is trying to do the Dutchboy ‘finger in the dam’ thingy, which either means he is finally losing his remaining marbles, or else things are so desperate that the leakage is starting to get out of hand.

Excuse me while I go load up on popcorn.
This may not result in legal proceedings (although it needs to), but no doubt there are business investors with long memories who are sharpening a few knives of economic retribution.

Here’s hoping ;-)))

And while I can see why Rove wants to pitch this story as a contest between deadbeat homeowners (most of whom, of course, are middle class) versus the middle class…

Couple of things — just reading Harry Shearer’s recent hour interview of Bill Black:

HARRY SHEARER: Let’s go back to why these loans were good business in the first place and how it actually worked. There have been a lot of folks – obviously there’s been a political divide on this issue, as in everything else, and Republicans tend to claim, “Well, it was Fannie and Freddie that were encouraging banks to make loans to people who were not normally creditworthy customers,” and folks on the other side of the fence have said, “No, it’s the securitization industry.” Seen from your point of view, how did this all get incentivized at the beginning?

BILL BLACK: Well it’s none of the above, is the first answer, although both of them contribute to this. So let’s go back in time. See, most people are focused, still, on subprime loans. And the real engine of destruction was liar’s loans in this crisis.

…

BILL BLACK: They got rid of all that. That’s what liar’s loans do. Get rid of all that underwriting. There’s just a loan application, and the loan application says, “Your income is this, and your employment is this, and your debts are this.” And they, the lender, don’t take any action to verify, to underwrite that.

Now we have known for centuries that if you do that, you will create massive fraud, and the worst possible borrowers will end up getting the loans, and you will lose money. So this is not bad luck. This is not “They were originally good loans but went bad.” This is born bad. Always, always, always throughout history end up disastrously bad.

And so, you know, in jargon they have a “negative expected value.” In English that means, “You do this, you lose money, you go bankrupt.”

…

Now people assume that the borrowers must be the liars in the liar’s loans, but that’s not how it works. It’s overwhelmingly the lenders that put the lies into the liar’s loans, and you’re right to ask about incentives, because they did it the good old-fashioned way. The CEO, when he’s the crook, gets to set the incentive structures for the entire system.

So this is more Rovian divide and conquer — you middle class, you go fight you deadbeats… and don’t nobody look at no CEOs…

BILL BLACK: Oh, it’s completely contrary to the interest of the banks, but banks aren’t animate. Officers run banks, and the officers – in jargon, they’re called “unfaithful agents,” and that pretty much captures it, although it’s not very strong, right? The CEO acts in his benefit. That’s – again, the whole idea of looting – that’s the looting, the CEO loots the corporation, but it’s bankruptcy for profit. The corporation fails. The CEO walks away wealthy.

And you are correct, if I add securitization to this mix, I can keep it going longer, and so instead of making five or six million dollars, I can keep this going and make $120 million if I grow really rapidly. And so, yes, the securitization adds to the mix, but it’s not a necessary condition to get these frauds going.