I hope the police will be there to arrest them as they would any person who disturbs a legal government event.

If trhey want to help, let them buy the property and let the people live free.

Listen My Fellow Americans,
I hope this woman makes a full recovery BUT Americans must live within their means. Not everyone can own a home. That is why there are apartments. When going to college, students should make wise deceisions about majors that will lead to jobs. If you major in the humanities these days don't ask for your loans to be forgiven. If you are in the armed forces, use the GI bill to get job training or an education. Don't lease cars, buy inexpensive ones and run them until they can no longer function. Buy a house within your means and stop keeping up with the Jones'.

I really hate this whole process of selling homes on the courthouse steps. I know it's the way it's done, but it's very humilating to the people whose houses have been foreclosed on. With that being said, there are a lot of legitimately foreclosed homes out there. Mine is one of them. It will be sold next month unless I come up with a miracle. I do not blame the mortgage company, because I have not made a payment since last August. They have tried to work with me, but I don't have a job and I have no job prospects. My brother (who I moved in with) lost his job back in June, and he was threatened with foreclosure. But Suntrust worked with him and he got a forebearance and a loan modification. Now he's making money, so at least we can stay. I think that most of the people on the foreclosure list just walked away from their homes. If you don't have a way to make any payment, and pay your utilities, why stay? It's sad, but that's the economy right now.

I agree with elements of what everyone has said as it is a complicated issue--like most issues. I also am in full support of and a participant in the Occupy movement both locally and around the country (and will be there today) for a number of reasons but the main being that it is largely young people taking control of their lives, government, economy and reexamining all of our long-held assumptions, many of which have gotten us in this mess--a true populist, grass roots movement. Occupy our Homes has already, in Atlanta, saved the home of an Iraqi war veteran and a 100 yr old lady. The fact is, if people stand up for their rights and negotiate with the banks then they will be forced to negotiate. Another fact is that the majority of mortgages written in that period of late 90's and early 200's are fraudulent and they know it so they will negotiate rather than go to court and be confronted with that proof. This is really "power to the people" and we are reaching out to the Tea Party and all people who want to take back control of their government and economy--which means taking back control of the corporations who have bought them.

I don't think protesting at the courthouse is productive at all. People, if you can't afford a house or if you loose your job, why should you get to keep living there, while the rest of us is paying our payments? what is so right about that? They have been auctioning off houses of this sort for years, and years....People want to blame corporations, it goes much deeper than that, President Clinton basically put the screws on the banks if they didn't hand out loans, and the nutcase Barney Frank, so there is alot of people to blame, but what about yourselves?? If you know you shouldn't be buying a house, then why did you all sign the papers?? Most of the houses in foreclosures is from people who should have been renting and were in over their heads from DAY ONE!...I know this, cause I know alot of these people and they even admit, that they should have been more resourceful and should have rented or leased a while longer, they were not ready for the responsiblities that come with owning a home...Alot of the corporate people began with nothing and worked 80-90 hour weeks to get to where they are, and then people that don't put in long hours want what they have...Do it the old fashion way, save and buy when you have the money and quit wanting a hand out..

How can people tell others to quit their jobs if their CEO is making millions? So that is what you would do?? Just up and quit, if you have NO CONTROL over your CEO's salary, and you need a job, you don't just quit in this economy, are you kidding me? I don't agree with some of the big salaries or BONUSES, But, I can't just quit my job cause I'm mad about it, that's crazy!

Based on what I see on the news, most of the "occupy" people are not home owners, alot of them are students, so really they are protesting about something that the majority know nothing about.

Also, I'm so glad that my tax money will be spent on the policemen that will need to be there because of their demonstration. (sarcasm)

Pam - I hope things work out for you and family in 2012.

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.

Let's remember what caused the economic mess that we're still trying to recover from. Loan originators (i.e., banks and mortgage companies) KNOWINGLY made extremely risky loans or obviously bad loans because they knew they could sell 100 percent of the risk to the investment houses that would turn around and sell them to investors in the form of mortgage-backed securities (which they paid ratings firms to rate highly, despite the fact that they were junk). These banks didn't care if the mortgages were paid because they were in it for the loan origination and servicing fees. The investment houses didn't care if the mortgages were safe because they were in it for the commissions from the sale of the securities. And given their influence in Washington, many were well aware that the government would likely step in to protect those primarily responsible from the downside to their ponzi schemes (prosecution and jail time, for example).

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/13/business/la-fi-wamu-inquiry13-2010apr13

If you don't want to click on the link above, here's an excerpt (note that Washington Mutual was just the tip of the iceberg)...

"It's hard to say which lender went berserk first," Muolo said, as the subprime rivals wound up adopting the philosophy "If he or she breathes, we will make the loan."...

The company and its Long Beach unit "used shoddy lending practices . . . to make tens of thousands of high-risk home loans that too often contained excessive risk, fraudulent information or errors," according to a subcommittee memo...

Adding to the problems, WaMu and Long Beach Mortgage frequently steered borrowers who qualified for prime loans into subprime loans, the subcommittee found. WaMu then spread the risk of those loans and riskier ones to investors by packaging the subprime loans into $77 billion worth of securities it sold to investors, the panel found.

"At times, WaMu selected and securitized loans that it had identified as likely to go delinquent," the report said.

Federal government/Fannie Mae

http://geke.us/FannieMaeVenn.html

The cause of the current financial crisis - derivatives. If you add up the value of every stock the market capitalization would be about $36 trillion. For bonds it's a market capitalization of about $72 trillion. The notional value of the derivative market is roughly $1.4 quadrillion. Derivatives aren't assets. They're just imaginary security of no value that financial institutions trade like a “gentleman’s bet” on the value of future risk or securities. And they are unregulated. And that's why our financial system collapsed and we have Occupy Wall Street.

In 1998 Brooksley Born (a woman) went to the trifecta - Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Bob Rubin - and said derivatives needed to be regulated. Greenspan's response? Nope, not gonna happen. That was 1998. Now with that knowledge criticize Occupy Wall Street.

Derivatives didn't cause the recession, but they definitely exacerbated it.

Derivatives are also known as credit default swaps or CDSs. They're traded over the counter, so no one knows exactly how much exposure they created, but estimates place the 2007 worldwide value at around $50 trillion.

It was because of its issuance of CDSs that the insurer AIG needed a government bailout. So, the financial panic was not limited to firms that over invested in mortgage-backed securities. It also affected companies that issued CDSs on mortgage-backed securities.

What is a derivative or a a CDS? It's an insurance policy. The seller of a CDS agrees to compensate the buyer in the event of a “credit event,” such as a default on these bonds. In return, the buyer makes premium payments to the seller.

However, unlike most insurance, people could buy a CDS on a mortgage-backed security they don't own. It's as if someone bought fire insurance on his neighbor’s house such that he benefits if the neighbor's house burns down.

Such insurance is structured as “swaps” to evade the regulations governing traditional insurance products. For example, if AIG wanted to sell life insurance to a you, it would have to set aside reserves to make it more likely that AIG could fulfill the policy if you died a week later. On the other hand, if AIG sold you a CDS against a bond default, then such regulations didn't apply.

Again, not the cause, but derivatives made the situation worse.

How about an administration which used taxpayers' money to bail out the banks, GM & Chrysler, energy, etc. with no strings attached. The government should have required the banks to put this money back into circulation by making decent loans to the citizenry instead of hiding it overseas or paying big bucks to execs. All of our problems go back to our 14+ trillion dollar debt that we can NEVER pay off. All of us are going to be in the same boat in a third world country before it is over with.