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 pension funds, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, sh*t as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The real reason America's cities and towns are going broke
The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to clean up the crime and bury the evidence pointing to the crime, 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 (by the banks) with the benefit of "cleaned-up" paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means "His Honor" could well be throwing one human being onto the street every 2.4 minutes.
America on sale, by banksters
Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might very well give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly eager for people to know about this stuff." 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. It couldn't be that bad.
However, when I went to sit in
on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville,
Florida, I was treated to an intimate,
and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis,
which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown
of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las
Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort
Myers, Florida, one
in 35. In September, lenders nationwide
took over a record 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all
home sales were distressed properties.
All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this
year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure. And as ever more of these foreclosed homes come back onto the market, at reduced prices, it will drive down the price of everyone elses property.
Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.
For most people, the bit about homeowners not paying their damn bills is the important part, while the latter, about the sudden and strange inability of the world's biggest and wealthiest banks to keep proper records, is incidental. Just a little office sloppiness, and who cares? Those deadbeat homeowners still owe the money, right? "They had it coming to them," is how a bartender at the Jacksonville airport put it to me.
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