Walker Veto's Money for Tear-down of Foreclosed Homes, as Governors Vengeance against Milwaukee continues.

Nothing says petty, small and vengeful than a former Milwaukee County Executive lashing out at his former Democratic city critics.

jsonline: Walker also vetoed a budget provision that would have provided $3.5 million over the next two years to communities statewide for demolishing foreclosed homes. Milwaukee would have gotten most of that money because it has the largest inventory of homes that need to be razed immediately. A city database indicates there are more than 800 bank-foreclosed homes in Milwaukee and an estimated 950 city-owned, tax-foreclosed properties. By the end of the year, officials estimate the city may have to take on hundreds more tax-foreclosed homes.

Not all of those homes will have to be demolished. But Milwaukee officials keep a "must-raze" list of 500 homes. On average it costs $15,000 to tear down a home.

All that on top of the following, which I didn't see on the list of veto's, but will affect taxpayers one way or another:

jsonline: The budget bill changes the way billboards are classified for tax purposes. Milwaukee currently assesses billboards as real property parcels and includes the value of the permit, which allows billboard companies to operate them legally.

The net effect of the change in the budget bill is that billboards would be classified as personal property. That means, according to Barrett, that assessments of billboards in Milwaukee alone will drop from $76 million to $6.6 million.

"We share your goal to lower the tax burden throughout the state, but this provision will only reduce the tax burden for companies that are primarily based out-of-state while raising property taxes for Milwaukee-based businesses and homeowners," Barrett said.

Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty!

Thom Hartmann has been talking about it for years, but the time has come to spread the word. If Republicans are truly supportive of our military and returning vets, than how could they ever object to revoking corporate charters for those illegally denying vets their rights? Not just vets, anyone who’s been victimized by our new corporate persons?  

After it was the first bank to be hit by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for defrauding consumers and ordered to pay $165 million to customers in refunds, Capital One was just hit with another fine. This time - the Department of Justice has ordered the bank to pay out $12 million to members of the military for denying them their legal right under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act to avoid foreclosures and high interest rates.

According to the DOJ - as many as 4,000 troops were illegally foreclosed on by the bank. Back in the old day, when corporations operated against the best interests of the nation - and preyed on our military members - there was a simple solution: the death penalty. The corporate death penalty - essentially revoking the corporation's charter - has a long history in America. It's time to bring it back.-Thom

Tammy Baldwin on Walker's Foreclosure Settlement Theft.

From Rachel Maddow who knows how to drive the point home:

Walker and Van Hollen now blame deceptive banking for Great Recession, not deceptive home buyers?

Now all of sudden, the story has changed!

First we were led to believe by our Republican authorities that the Great Recession came about by lazy poor home buyers who couldn’t afford their mortgages, and knew it. They scammed bankers and tanked the economy. Now the story has changed, once the bank settlement checks were passed out.

Governor Walker, Attorney General Van Hollen and Secretary of the Department of Financial Institutions Peter Bildsten, will announce ‐ ‐ that Wisconsin has formally joined a landmark $25 billion joint federal‐state agreement with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers over foreclosure abuses and fraud, and unacceptable nationwide mortgage servicing practices.  The proposed agreement provides Wisconsin an estimated $140 million.

Our great heroes of the middle class don't mind feeding off the settlement money that were the result of the Obama administrations dogged pursuit of the banks. Hey, didn't Mitt Romney want the mortgage market foreclosures to "bottom out?" Didn't congressional Republicans want to blame poor home buyers and deregulate the banks? 

Posing for holy pictures, Scott Walker and J.B. Van Hollen posed for holy pictures;

“The settlement being announced today will help bring relief to Wisconsinites who were harmed byunfair mortgage practices and help prevent future deception from occurring,” said Governor Walker.  

But according WKOW 27, in an interview with JB Van Hollen, he reveals the state is getting its filthy hands on a large part of it for the general fund. One time money to help bail them out of the new deficit estimate of their current budget? Not a lot is known about how the money is supposed to be divided up, but the question has to be asked because...who can trust these crooks?

"It's Working"...fewer families live in homes now, Low Apartment Availability.

Gov. Scott Walker's plan is working, and families continue to see the American dream slipping away. Thank you Scott Walker for cutting the pay of public workers, the loss of consumer certainty, thank you big banks sitting on their money, Wall Street gamblers, and thank you Republican deregulators. Channel3000:



Walker says it's working...

Madison's apartment vacancy rate hit its lowest level in at least 16 years, as economic challenges have forced thousands of Madison residents to seek affordable units. Only 2.6 percent of the city's apartment units were available in the third quarter … Vacancies have dwindled nearly every year since 2005, when 6.4 percent of units didn't have occupants.

The high demand is causing rent prices to increase and allowing landlords to turn more potential tenants away, said Brenda Konkel, executive director at the Tenant Resource Center in Madison. "It's probably the worst I've seen it," she said. "For people who have had problems with unemployment, who don't have steady income, for people who have any type of blemish on their rental record, it's become incredibly difficult."

The vacancy rates are all below 1 percent in the 53726 and 53715 zip codes on the near West Side … Many people who can't afford to buy a home are staying in apartments, while banks turn others seeking a mortgage away. Many others facing foreclosures return to rentals, and developers have been unwilling to add affordable units into the market.

Kicking Foreclosed Homeowners when they're down. In this Dickensian age, anything for money.

Chris Hayes shines a bright light on the current insane loan modification law. This time, Arizona's AG is on the right side, out to protect Americans from predatory foreclosure scam.

Foreclosure Crisis: The real story

This is getting bigger and bigger because it could crash our economy again. Seriously:

AP: Officials in 50 states and the District of Columbia have launched a joint investigation into allegations that mortgage companies mishandled documents and broke laws in foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of homeowners … will examine whether mortgage company employees made false statements or prepared documents improperly … Employees of four large lenders have acknowledged in depositions that they signed off on foreclosure documents without reading them.

Here’s a more simple explanation, Huffington Post:

Let’s straighten some facts out first. Lenders aren’t just making “mistakes”—they’re fabricating documents, forging signatures and lying to judges in order to illegally throw people out of their homes and slap them with thousands of dollars in illegal fees. Banks are resorting to fraud for a reason—they don’t have the documents that prove they have the right to foreclose. It’s not like JPMorgan Chase or GMAC need to dig through a filing cabinet to find the right form—the form doesn’t exist. Banks willfully, knowingly destroyed key documentation in order to cut costs and boost bonuses.

Other banks that bundled these mortgages into complex securities didn’t ask for
this documentation for the same reasons. This creates legal liabilities for the banks that can push them into failure. A lot of these securities were packed with fraudulent mortgages—loans where banks falsified borrower information in order to push them into predatory loans. Investors who brought these mortgages have been trying to force banks to repurchase the fraudulent loans. But now that banks cannot even document which loans they own, the entire fraudulent mortgage securitization framework may land on the banks' doorstep. If that happens, we’re going to see some very big banks go under.

What does all this mean for borrowers? We’ve already seen plenty of cases in which banks are foreclosing on the wrong homes—kicking out borrowers who haven’t missed any payments, or borrowers who are working with the bank on receiving a loan modification to keep them in their homes. But even for borrowers who have stopped paying their mortgages, the fraud process creates serious dangers. Banks charge all kinds of fees on borrowers when they foreclose—fees that often amount to thousands of dollars. The current wave of fraud is enabling an onslaught of grotesque, illegal fees. When you create new documents and forge signatures, you can claim people agreed to ridiculous things they never agreed to, tell ridiculous lies about the house being foreclosed on, and generate thousands of dollars in improper fees.

And in the ultimate example of the Randian free marketplace:

In other words, banks and their lawyers are breaking the law to steal from borrowers facing financial hardship. This impropriety may create losses so big that megabanks are going to fail. Smart political leaders need to get out there right now and prove that they are backing American families, not Wall Street elites.

A foreclosure moratorium is the first step, the second is a major new initiative to reduce mortgage debt to a level that borrowers can afford—that prevents foreclosures and keeps this mess from spiraling into a financial calamity. The mortgage market needs to reflect economic reality, not inflated banker dreams.

Related articles

• Zach Carter: Axelrod Is Wrong: Obama Must Protect American Families From Wall Street Fraud (huffingtonpost.com)
• Zach Carter: The Subprime Swindle and the Foreclosure Fraud Cover-Up (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Subprime Swindle and the Foreclosure Fraud Cover-Up... (projectworldawareness.com)
• Foreclosure fraud should generate indictments (dailykos.com)