October 28, 2010

Foreclosuregate in 30 Seconds

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“Foreclosuregate,” as it’s been dubbed, is a complex mess of a problem. You’ve got “robo signers,” the mortgage servicing employees who scrawled their signatures on hundreds of thousands of crucial legal filings without knowing what they said (violating federal rules), and “foreclosure mills,” the full-steam-ahead law firms that cut corners and allegedly broke the law in foreclosing on homeowners quick and dirty (and are now facing multiple investigations). There’s trusts and mortgage-backed securities and securitization itself. The list goes on and on.

But if you’re looking for a quick, 30-second take on why Foreclosuregate matters, want to know what’s at stake with this deception of the legal process and the questions surrounding millions of foreclosures nationwide, watch the clip below. It features Damon Silvers, policy director at the AFL-CIO and member of the Congressional Oversight Panel, a bailout watchdog, giving as succinct a take on the foreclosure mess as I’ve heard.

(H/T Karl Denninger)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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