Florida judge: We don't look at the mortgage foreclosure paperwork we process

Thanks to Matt Taibbi, who's been all over the foreclosure crisis, including what's been happening in the courtroom, comes this, from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

Judges do not question the documents unless homeowners question them first, so they continue to rule in favor of lenders. Twelfth Circuit Chief Judge Lee Haworth said judges must remain neutral in court, and cannot raise possible defenses -- such as bad paperwork -- on behalf of homeowners who choose not to fight, or don't know how to fight, their foreclosure.

"The judges will accept, as they do in every case, pleadings that are represented by counsel as legitimate," said Haworth. "It's the defendant's case. ... If they don't want to hire an attorney, that's their business."

Before that starts to sound reasonable to you, consider this. Taibbi:

[T]he idea that it is beyond a judge to open a file and simply check to make sure the names and dates are right -- particularly given the widespread coverage of this phenomenon, when we know that virtually 100% of these securitized mortgages lack proper paperwork and will inevitably involve fraudulent or doctored filings upon foreclosure -- that is appalling.

This just gives judges a way to be complicit.

Why would they want to do that? you ask. It's the Judge Judy–Jerry Springer effect. Taibbi says it his way (my emphasis):

Judges I think are long used to the idea that individual people are deadbeats and don't pay bills -- they've seen enough lying-ass individual debtors stand in their courts with their faces unshaven and their shirts untucked, trying to sell them excuses and stories -- but they haven't quite made it to a place where they can accept the idea that the nation's top 10-20 banks could be engaged in ongoing criminal conspiracies. I think it blows their minds and they don't believe it.

My answer: Ignore the rest and look just at the bolded part above. We're carefully conditioned by Judge Judy and Cops on Parade (all politically slanted "culture" shows) to think of low-wage-earners-facing-The-Law as automatically wrong — and automatically disgusting.

Judges swim in that cultural pool as well; they drink the same tainted water you do. That thirty-year war against the poor — you could almost think it was planned by someone with something to gain, and someone to manipulate.

GP