Ikenna Njoku spent five days in jail, had his car seized and auctioned off, and lost his job. All because Chase bank thought their own check was a forgery.  

From WTSP-Tampa Bay:

Imagine coming back to your home after being away a few weeks and finding the locks changed and the home trashed. That’s what happened to Chris Boudreau of Brooksville.

Boudreau showed us the home, which was stripped bare.

Walking through the living room, he tells us “I used to have a couch, a sofa, a couple of end tables, a TV, DVD  player, tapes and cabinet… but  they are now gone.”

It happened after 21 Mortgage Corporation in Knoxville, which is Boudreau’s lender, hired a local company to do the job.

From The Huffington Post:

Poll data by the Democratic-aligned Public Policy Polling released Wednesday said voters in Ohio, Missouri, Montana and Minnesota back hiking taxes on the wealthy — even for people with incomes as low as $150,000.

The respondents were asked: “In order to reduce the national debt, would you support or oppose raising taxes on those with incomes over $1,000,000 a year?”

Nearly 80 percent of voters in the four states backed the idea.

If a bank fails and contributes to a financial crisis, shouldn’t the CEO face some sort of financial consequence? Seems like a no-brainer. But not if you ask a bank executive. 

Rev., Errol Thompson, a pastor of New Fellowship Baptist Church in Orlando and chairman of PICO United Florida, recently wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel holding the Florida AG Pam Bondi accountable for her support of the big banks.  

These banks enjoyed all of the upsides of the boom while facing little of the consequences of the bust. Any attempt to make them forgive even a modest amount of this negative equity has been met with arguments from Wall Street CEOs that we need to ensure “fairness” in the modification process and warnings about moral hazard.

What is surprising — and disappointing for Floridians — was when our Attorney General Pam Bondi echoed these same talking points during a 50-state investigation into fraudulent behavior by the big banks. 

Rev. Thompson turns the idea of a moral hazard back on Bondi.

Ironically, by taking a firm opposition to helping homeowners, Bondi is at risk of moral hazard herself: making responsible Florida homeowners like the Mercados continue to bear the full brunt of the cost of the housing bubble and bust, while letting the big Wall Street banks that fueled and profited from this crisis continue to avoid paying their fair share.

Click on the link to read the whole post.

As Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden pointed out today, contrary to Republican pronouncements, the U.S. is actually a very low-tax country. “Deficits do not stem from spending levels alone. They are the product of a mismatch between spending and revenue. And when revenue is as low as ours is, you end up with big deficits,” he explained.

For more than two years these big banks have strung homeowners along, forcing them to submit paperwork over and over, putting them on hold for hours, leaving them in limbo for months and ultimately denying hundreds of thousands of families a chance to hold onto their homes