Maddow on Mortgage Fraud-NC County Recorder sues big banks for dozens of instances of "fraud"
By Gaius Publius on 3/25/2012 02:48:00 PM
"The banks could start losing these cases," says Maddow. Yes, there's hope - the real kind.
This is an excellent primer on the mortgage mess (it's actually a crime scene, as you'll see). Very watchable, easily grasped. Please take time, if you have it, to view. This is ground-zero for the greatest challenge to our legal system in modern times. As Jeff Thigpen says in the clip, this is a "rule of law" story - writ large, in my view.
(Our primer is here, if you want a fuller explanation.)
Note especially that, despite the apparent impossibility of going through the Bush II-Obama I bank-fraud indemnification firewall, you (and your county clerk) can do it. As Maddow says (at 4:22):
Going after the banks by going through their paperwork turns out to be not that hard to do; regular people can do it, with a little training. ... It's looking more and more like they may be onto something.
Change "may be" to "are" and you have it.
It helps to have a Jeff Thigpen (4:50 in the clip; that's his face below), but there are lots of counties in the country. It won't take many of them to bust this wide. Watch:
This is about property rights (yes, good old libertarian property rights) versus hiding and indemnifying the massive criminal banking fraud that led to the 2008 crisis - and making sure that prosecuting said fraud doesn't bring down the entire U.S. banking system.
That's a really tough place to be, isn't it - caught between systemic banking collapse and protection of property rights. What's a money-hungry political ad campaign to do?
I'll have more on this - David Dayen and Digby have aired this issue in a recent Virtually Speaking episode that's a textbook explanation of this Scylla-Carybdis dilemma.
GP