this article is kinda all over the place, but it has some pretty shocking points:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/16/the-1s-hand-in-the-afghan-murders/
This passage is crazy. I wonder what happens to the
"blame the consumer" conservative mind, when it turns out that a lot of the consumers here are also members of the military... and of course, they always "
support the troops"??? Will their heads just explode?
“The margins on these loans are disaster waiting to happen” and admitted that mortgage lenders deliberately targeted military families like the Bales family, swindling them into signing onto far pricier refinancing loans “that benefited lenders and mortgage brokers” at the expense of vulnerable military families, as well as minorities and low-income borrowers. Another local real estate businessman who specializes in short sales agreed, telling
Businessweek that “we set them up.”
“It’s not an unfamiliar story, but it’s sad,” said Richard Eastern, a co-founder of Bellevue, Washington-based Washington Property Solutions, which negotiates short sales. “We’re going to send you off to war but we’re going to foreclose on your home.” He said many lenders offered loans they knew borrowers couldn’t repay. “And it’s not just soldiers, it’s everybody.
We set them up.”
The extent to which mortgage lenders and banks deliberately preyed on American military families is made clear by this little-known fact: the Tacoma region, home to Fort Lewis-McChord, the largest base in the Western United States and home to 100,000 military personnel and family, suffered one of the worst predatory subprime loan epidemics in the country, an anomaly in the state of Washington. According to Richard Eastern’s firm, roughly half of all home sales in that region are either foreclosures or short sales. As early as 2007, the
Wall Street Journal singled out Tacoma as one of the nation’s worst affected regions from subprime plunder.
of course, the didn't only target members of the military, although those cases are pretty egregious, since it's hard to fight foreclosure when you're fighting a war...
same thing all across the board though. hard to fight foreclosure when they forge documents, so you don't even have any idea what you're getting.