From: Alternet
by Ellen Brown
Mayor Gayle McLaughlin is using eminent domain to help homeowners and challenge Too Big to Fail.
March 3, 2014
| In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorgan Chase admitted
that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage
fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage
meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a
dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no
prominent banker has gone to jail. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of all mortgages nationally
remain underwater (meaning the balance owed exceeds the current value
of the home), sapping homeowners’ budgets, the housing market and the
economy. Since the banks, the courts and the federal government have
failed to give adequate relief to homeowners, some cities are taking
matters into their own hands.
Gayle McLaughlin, the bold mayor of Richmond, California, has gone
where no woman dared go before, threatening to take underwater mortgages
by eminent domain from Wall Street banks and renegotiate them on behalf
of beleaguered homeowners. A member of the Green Party, which takes no
corporate campaign money, she proved her mettle standing up to Chevron,
which dominates the Richmond landscape. But the banks have signaled that
if Richmond or another city tries the eminent domain gambit, they will
rush to court seeking an injunction. Their grounds: an unconstitutional
taking of private property and breach of contract.
How to refute those charges? There is a way; but to understand it,
you first need to grasp the massive fraud perpetrated on homeowners. It
is how you were duped into paying more than your house was worth; why
you should not just turn in your keys or short-sell your underwater
property away; why you should urge Congress not to legalize the MERS
scheme; and why you should insist that your local government help you
acquire title to your home at a fair price if the banks won’t. That is
exactly what Richmond and other city councils are attempting to do
through the tool of eminent domain. MORE
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