the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 20, 2011
If you want an idea of how out-of-control the banks were during the mortgage crisis, you just have to look at the way they treated soldiers.
It’s supposed to be illegal to seize the homes of active-duty soldiers, but that didn’t stop Bank of America and Morgan Stanley from pushing through to foreclose on hundreds if not thousands of soldiers. They just settled with the Justice Department, agreeing to repay up to 178 soldiers they’d illegally foreclosed on.
How could this have happened? After all, the law is very clear.But the law means nothing to the big banks. The banks had mortgages; the mortgages stopped being paid; so they went after anyone and everyone they could find to MAKE them pay, or give up their homes.
And these 178 soldiers who got payments are just the tip of the iceberg. No one knows how many more soldiers had their homes stolen: soldiers who weren’t part of this suit, or who were killed before getting their homes back, or are still in Afghanistan (or Iraq, or Libya, or Yemen, or Pakistan...) and can’t respond. The paperwork on these mortgages is so messed up, it’s impossible to tell.
Not only that, but it doesn’t begin to touch the legal mortgage scam orchestrated by the big banks, a scam in which 3.5 million people have lost their homes!
Even with these tiny repayments, those banks are still rolling in the dough, thank you very much!