“Fraud”-Closure- Not A Love Story

The state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called, is presided over by retired judges, not elected or appointed, who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages. WALL STREET CREATED AND ENGINEERED THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.

ACLU STEPS IN:

An appellate court has given judges of the foreclosure court system in Lee County, Florida, 20 days to respond to a petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which alleges the county circuit courts ignore procedural safeguards in order to rush foreclosures through and clear out their backlog of cases. (Commonly called “rocket-docket)

In doing so, the ACLU says local foreclosure judges “systematically deny homeowners a fair opportunity to defend their homes against foreclosure.”

The 20th Judicial Circuit Court in Lee County handles foreclosure proceedings for the southwest Florida counties of Charlotte, Collier, Glades, and Hendry, as well as Lee.

According to the ACLU, this special “mass foreclosure docket,” which was established in December 2008, operates under rules that differ substantially from those that govern the rest of Lee County’s civil cases and was designed to speed through as many foreclosure cases as possible.

Florida’s judicial system has long been plagued with a log jam of foreclosure petitions, to the point that the Florida State Courts Administration lobbied legislators last year for millions of dollars in additional funding to bring in additional case managers and judges.

Included in documents obtained by the ACLU through a public records request filed in October were several internal emails sent among Lee County foreclosure court officials.

One of the emails outlined the court’s specific numerical goal for clearing foreclosure cases, which the court had not previously made public. According to a court administrator, “our goal for this project is to “dispose of” the number of cases filed each month “plus 1,040 additional cases.”

In another email from September 2010, one judge says she “uniformly” denies motions to continue foreclosure cases in instances where homeowners argue there is additional discovery that needs to be undertaken or they are pursuing a settlement agreement.

“No one should ever have to go to court with the deck already stacked against them,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “Nowhere does it say someone is entitled only to the justice we have time for. We can’t allow the basic protections of due process to be the victim of judicial shortcuts.”

The ACLU’s petition is the culmination of a months-long investigation. With one in every 288 housing units in foreclosure, the organization says Lee County has the highest percentage of foreclosures in the state, arguably the epicenter of the nation’s foreclosure crisis.

ACLU officials note that the chief justice of the state Supreme Court has issued explicit instructions that reducing the backlog of foreclosure cases should not “interfere with a judge’s ability to adjudicate each case fairly on its merits.”

Despite this directive, the civil rights group says Lee County judges move through cases “at lightning speed,” sometimes seeing as many as 200 cases a day.

The Second District Court of Appeal in Lakeland has ordered Lee County court officials to respond to the ACLU’s petition by May 8.

Rachel Goodman is an attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. She said, “By ordering the circuit court to account for its practice of prioritizing speed over accuracy…the appellate court clearly recognizes that there are serious issues at play here. It is incumbent upon the courts to ensure that the rights of homeowners are protected and that they get a fair opportunity to protect their homes.”

The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke  Judges to Blame

The rocket docket was created and implemented in Broward County, by Judge Tobin and enforced by Judge Breger and Judge Gate,  to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Broward County Judge, Eli Breger’s  goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour and approx 300 per day. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes, and he is succeeding. For the more fortunate people that can afford an appeal, yes his ruling are deemed “he abused his discretion” and remanded back, TO HIM ( not a joke, a fact). Lots of luck getting justice from Judge Breger.

Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren’t exactly public. “The judges might give you a hard time about watching,” one lawyer warned. “They’re not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff.” Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn’t be that bad. HAVE WE TURNED THIRD WORLD OR COMMUNISTIC?

Well it was true and it took an Order from the Florida Supreme Court to allow public viewing of foeclosure hearings.

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