I cannot overemphasize what a big deal it will be to have Katie Porter (@katieporteroc) in Congress. The long version is here - I wrote it last April - but let me hit some highlights: theintercept.com/2017/04/04/an-…
The whole country learned about Wall Street's mass fraud in foreclosure cases in 2010. Porter had it figured out three years earlier, in 2007.
She wrote this paper while at the Univ. of Iowa, "Misbehavior and Mistake in Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Porter examined public court records in 1,733 bankruptcy cases filed in 2006. She found all kinds of errors; in one loan, the mortgage company claimed that the homeowner owed $1 million when they actually owed $60,000.
But this was the critical piece: in a majority of cases, mortgagors lacked one or more pieces of documentation required to establish the validity of the debt. The note was missing over 40% of the time. This was an early warning of the breakdown in foreclosure processes.
The foreclosure victims and lawyers who eventually exposed the entire scandal took their cues from this early paper from Porter in 2007.
Porter was in the activist position on the outside of power, trying to get justice for these crimes. She ended up moving inside when Kamala Harris, then AG, made her California's monitor of the foreclosure settlement.
This could have been a paper-pushing position. Porter could have simply filed a couple reports and ensured the banks kept to the extremely weak terms. But Porter made it into an activist position.
She intervened personally in over 5,000 individual foreclosure cases, hounding the banks to give families better terms. She also forced banks to rewrite their outreach letters to borrowers.
In the end, nearly 40 percent of the total 83,000 first-lien principal reductions in the settlement happened in California. Homeowners in the state simply got a better deal, thanks to Katie Porter.
I wasn't totally thrilled with how Porter ran the final stages of her race, but she did what she felt she had to do, and obviously it was successful. What I know is that someone in Congress who actually understands the financial industry from a consumer perspective is amazing.
Members of Congress are too often snowed by lobbyists who use complexity to obfuscate. Katie Porter is not going to be fooled by this. She has done the work to expose what bank practices mean for the average American.
She'd better get on the House Financial Services Committee, and from that perch I'm certain she will do a fantastic job. Congrats to @katieporteroc!
