by Zach Carter
If senior White House adviser David Axelrod’s comments this weekend are any indication, the Obama administration is woefully misreading the foreclosure fraud crisis currently gripping the U.S. economy. Axelrod refused to commit the administration to a national moratorium on foreclosures, and mischaracterized a massive, systematic fraud perpetrated by Wall Street banks as a set of unfortunate “mistakes.” This is not a minor scandal and it will not simply go away. President Barack Obama needs to stand up for the middle class and protect our economy from Wall Street theft. If he doesn’t, the economic and political price will be devastating.
The full transcript of Axelrod’s appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation with Bob Shieffer is here, but here are his key comments, emphasis mine:
“It’s bad for the housing market and it’s bad for these institutions which is why they’re scrambling now to– to go back through and– and– and through their documentation for all of this as they should. The President was concerned enough to veto a bill that came to him last Thursday, that would have unintentionally made it perhapseasier to make mistakes. . . . I’m not sure about a national moratorium because there are, in fact, valid foreclosures that– that– that probably should go forward. And where the documentation and paperwork is– is proper, but we are working closely with these institutions to make sure that they expedite the process of going back and reconstructing these and throwing out those that don’t work . . . . Our hope is that this moves rapidly and that this gets unwound very, very quickly.”
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. Consumer advocates were not worried that the bill Obama vetoed on Friday would make it easier for lenders to make “mistakes”—they were worried it would make it harder to expose rampant, systematic fraud committed by Wall Street banks against American families.
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