By Michael Collins
Florida Governor Rick Scott may have just one more day to veto Florida's big-bank friendly foreclosure act, HB 87. Nearly 1,200 Floridians have signed the Veto Florida's Foreclosure Act Petition, despite indifferent coverage by Florida's mainstream media. We would know the exact deadline required for the governor's veto if HB 87 appeared on the governor's live legislative action web page. For some reason, it's not there. (Image)

HB 87 speeds up the Florida's home foreclosure process by making it easier for banks to throw citizens out of their homes. The burden of proof is switched from the plaintiff, banks, to the defendant, homeowners. When the bill's requirements for evidence gathering to appeal an initial judgment combine with general rules for discovery, defendants have just days to put together a case. See Florida HB 87, Homeowners, and the Foreclosure Inferno for a detailed run down of just some of the major problems.

Why do Banks Want a Friendly Foreclosure Bill in Florida?

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Michael Collins

Justice and basic concepts of law are sacrificed to allow banks greater ease and efficiency in taking possession of your home.

A bill passed last week by the Florida legislature offers efficiencies and advantages to banks that may launch a major increase in foreclosures in the state known for its volatile real estate market. The only thing standing in the way is a veto by Governor Rick Scott. (Image: Nathan Rein)

HB 87 shifts the burden of proof from the plaintiff, typically a bank, to the defendant, the homeowner. If the bill is signed into law, homeowners must prove that the bank lacks the legal right to take your home within 20 to 45 days of the date that the bank served the foreclosure notice. The reduced timeline restricts the ability to gather evidence from the bank and test it (Does the bank actually have a legal record of your mortgage?). Without the time to discover evidence, homeowners are at a major disadvantage at the initial hearing or appealing a decision, presuming there are funds for an appeal.

The bank-friendly bill, H.B. 87, was passed by the Florida Senate 27 to 13 and House of Representatives 87 to 26 in partisan votes with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed. However, when Democrats in the Florida Senate had opportunities to stop the bill due to rules violations, none spoke up. The party line vote was a sideshow that masked the bipartisan assent without objection to what may be the most pro-bank legislation in any major state.

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Michael Collins
That's what Blythe Masters of JPMorgan does based on evidence from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and JPMorgan's recent history. (Image: UCS)

Coal power is the leading source carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. CO2 is the leading cause of climate change. Once airborne, the man made filth sticks around for 2 to 20 centuries. In addition, coal power is "a leading cause of smog, acid rain, and toxic air pollution."

All that makes us sick reflected in a an annual health care price tag of $333 to $500 billion in costs for heart and lung diseases, for example. Tens of thousands die from those diseases eery year.

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Michael Collins

(Washington, DC 1/21) A long standing Money Party front, the Business Roundtable, wants you to wait until you're 70 years old before you get Social Security and Medicare benefits. This is just a reprise of the November 2012 dictate from the king of corporate cronyism, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. (Image: DonkeyHotey) (Greenspan statement)

The boss announced, "So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained." Lloyd Blankfein, CBS News, November 2012

That's easy for Lloyd to say. He makes tens of millions of dollars a year without so much as lifting a finger. You can be sure that Blankfein has a deluxe health insurance and retirement plan.

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By Michael Collins

(Washington, DC 1/9/13) Let's say that on a Monday, you sit down and take a hard look at your finances. Your bills exceed your income, assets are just a feint memory, and there is no relief in sight. Reluctantly, you decide that your only choice is to declare bankruptcy. On Tuesday you say, I think I'll do some shopping before it's all over. You proceed to charge $2,000 on your VISA card for some jewelry and other non essentials. On Wednesday, you get a lawyer and file for bankruptcy.

Guess what? You still owe the $2,000 since the court will conclude that you made the purchases fraudulently. You knew you were filing for bankruptcy and made the charges any way. Even worse, the court may refuse to grant the bankruptcy filing all together as a result of the obvious fraud.

That is exactly what the Republicans in the House of Representatives are doing with their open announcement that they will vote against raising the debt ceiling without their solution to government spending. Since that announcement, has one single deficit hawk stood up and said, We must stop all spending as of this moment since we are proposing to default on those expenditures?

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The Godfather unregulated banking, Sanford I Weill, just endorsed restoring the most fundamental provision of the Glass-Steagal Act - separating banks from risky investment activity, a cardinal principal of banking regulation from the Great Depression through the end of the Clinton administration (Weill Calls for Splitting up the Big Banks, NYT, July 26), If he's serious, Weill should also demand a repeal of Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, that bipartisan legislation that allowed derivatives to function without regulation. A turnaround by some masters of finance should not obscure the history described below (thepeoplesvoice.org, April 14, 2009). It's a toxic brew of the greed that motivate the ultra rich and their minions.

 

Huge majorities in both houses of Congress voted for legislation to allow the biggest bank heist of all time. But this time, it was the banks pulling the heist.

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What sort of person would deliberately ignore the obvious fundamental reality of any budget?

By Numerian

It’s hard to say if the Tea Party has an acknowledged leader, but someone who professes to be just that has chosen a very opportune moment to trash Speaker John Boehner’s attempts to craft legislation that would allow an increase in the debt ceiling. Judson Phillips, the CEO of Tea Party Nation, is the self-acknowledged head of the Tea Party, and in an editorial this morning in The Washington Post, he attacks Boehner’s legislation for providing “almost non-existent budget cuts.”

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By Michael Collins

The crazies in the United States House of Representatives would have you believe it were so. They say fix that budget before we'll raise the debt ceiling. If we don't get our fix, they announce, there's no deal. We'll just default until things get straightened out. (Image: George Romero)

Let's see what would happen to you or me. We are unable to pay our bills, unless we tap a special line of credit that we've used in the past, one that has never failed us. We'll have to raise some money and cut some expenses too.

We're tired of paying bills and just want to stop for a while. We file for bankruptcy following all of the required procedures. The minute we file, we're granted an automatic stay on our debt. We are now protected, no bills to pay.

Then we get a few visits from creditors. They let us know that they know we can pay. Other people owed money show up also and ask, what is your problem? You owe us the money. You can pay and you will. The combination of angry creditors and recipients of our funds forces us to do what we could have done in the first place.

We tap the line of credit, cut expenses, and increase income. We make the payments we could have made all along. Once again, we have the choice of fixing things long term or repeating the process yet again.

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