For almost four years now, I have said over and over again that unless and until the residential housing market is stabilized, there will be no overall recovery of the U.S. economy. The collapse of the housing market has resulted in billions of lost equity on the part of consumers, countless families losing their homes, and countless lost jobs in housing related industries. One would think that fixing the foreclosure disaster would be priority number 1 with both houses of Congress. But such is not the case. Banks and lenders were bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars yet they have not passed any benefit on to home owners. Nor has Congress demanded any real accountability. In the case of the GOP, one would even think that the Congressional Republicans want the housing market to continue to spiral downward -probably hoping for political advantage. Never mind the families and lives being destroyed and damaged. Huffington Post has a piece that looks at John Boehner's efforts in particular to fight meaningful foreclosure relief measures. Like most in the GOP, Boehner wears his religiosity on his sleeve but acts in a most un-Christian manner. Here are some highlights:*
Regina Moore has lived in her Hamilton, Ohio, home, in the heart of House Speaker John Boehner's district, for 50 years. Her husband passed away in 2005, and in 2008 she took out a new $72,000 mortgage so she could afford to pay her medical bills. She had a steady job, having worked at the Champion Printing Company in Cincinnati for more than two decades. Her monthly payments on her $86,000 home amounted to about $450.
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It was a simple mortgage for a simple home -- no exploding payments or swimming pools. But last year, at the age of 70, Regina lost her job, and her $1100 a month Social Security payment wasn't enough to make ends meet.
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While Jeff, a local housing group and a lender ultimately helped Regina modify her mortgage so she could stay in her home, many of her fellow Ohioans haven't been so fortunate. Hamilton, about 45 minutes outside of Cincinnati, has one of the highest foreclosure rates in Butler County. And Butler County has been a foreclosure hotspot for years. Along with the Cleveland and Columbus areas, Cincinnati and its surroundings have seen the predatory subprime binge come and go and now watch as the crumbling job market pushes more and more homeowners into financial ruin.
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"In the beginning, we really saw more loans that we thought had predatory features," said Sister Barbara Busch, a Catholic social justice worker who serves as Executive Director of a Cincinnati-based homeowner advocacy group called Working In Neighborhoods . . . n 2010 we saw a large number of unemployed, where the loans themselves weren't so bad, but people had just lost their jobs."
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Others who work with struggling homeowners say the same thing: The initial wave of mortgage problems was due to people unable to manage exotic or high-risk mortgages, but the current problem simply involves people losing jobs in a weak economy who can't pay their bills.
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These are homeowners who have done everything right in the sense that they were careful about the kind of mortgage they got, they didn't buy a property they couldn't afford, but now they're facing long-term unemployment."
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Over the past three years, lawmakers across Ohio have pressed for foreclosure relief, often crossing party lines to do so. But Boehner has never joined the effort. When Rep. Steve Chabot, a fellow Republican whose district borders Boehner's and shares many of its economic hardships, backed a 2008 bill to grant relief to homeowners in bankruptcy courts, Boehner refused to sign on.
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the House Speaker made the case for his opposition to foreclosure aid in a recent appearance on CBS News' Face The Nation. "Over the last couple years, Congress has really set up four programs to help with those mortgage problems," Boehner told CBS' Harry Smith. "And unfortunately, none of those have worked. And all they've really done is dragged out the length of time for the market to clear the problems."
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"If people are trapped in houses where they can't pay their mortgage but can pay something, you can prevent areas from becoming desolated by foreclosed and abandoned homes, which drive down prices for everyone," said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning research group.
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And Boehner consistently votes with Wall Street on major policy issues. He voted in favor of the bank bailout in 2008, and opposed financial reform legislation in 2009 and 2010, even as he socialized with such major financiers as JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in an effort to raise campaign cash.
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[U]nlike other TARP programs, including Obama's HAMP initiative, the Ohio government actually requires banks to sign a legally binding contract with the state, creating clearly defined obligations: the bank gets money, but the mortgage must be modified. But the program has serious flaws. Jeff said he couldn't understand why it took seven months for his mother's paperwork to be approved. It wasn't terribly complicated, he said; either the numbers worked, or they didn't.
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Big banks, by contrast, are frequently combative throughout the entire foreclosure process. The Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio (LASSWO) is currently suing Bank of America on behalf of 12 families, including at least one in Boehner's district, for filching on loan modification agreements that it made during an October 2009 in-person "borrower outreach" program in Cincinnati. The Treasury Department sponsored the event as part of its HAMP program.
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Boehner rebuffed efforts to divert some of that federal funding to help borrowers in foreclosure litigation. As the vote approached, Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel, launched a broadside against the entire effort.
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The article continues, but you get the drift. As for Bank of America, from what I have seen of the way it treats legitimately distressed homeowners, I would personally never do business with the ban again. I encourage others to likewise avoid it like the plague. Lies, incompetence and unreasonable conduct are the norm in my opinion.
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