I don't know anything about this magazine, "Veterans Today." This is most of the article, you can read the whole thing at
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/11/30 ... eclosures/Banks Targeting Military Families for Illegal Foreclosures
Military and Veteran Family Evictions, One Every Few Minutes
Up to One Third of Veterans Lost their Homes Since 2008
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Figures lie, some groups are counted, some are not. But the lowest figures available have one in three families, this includes active duty serving overseas, reservists and National Guard and veterans losing their homes since 2008.
Two thirds of those are now “split up” with at least one member listed as “homeless.” Almost all are, according to official figures, “living in poverty.”
One government program, only covering those currently serving active duty, who needed mortgage help, responded. The Homeowners Assistance Program, run through the Department of Defense, has aided some families, making up shortfalls in payments and buying homes outright.
For others, however, the story has been very different. Banks have saddled military and veterans families with thousands of dollars in illegal charges, in most cases not only violations of the mortgage contract procedures themselves but, in many cases, outright criminal fraud.
Veterans are easy targets. They are vulnerable, often unaware of their rights and too often predisposed toward subservience to authority, even when that “authority”is a court bailiff with fraudulent eviction papers or a court pressing an eviction proceeding based on what is in thousands of cases forged documents.
Illegal Foreclosures With No Paper Trail
In many cases of bank repossession of homes of active duty and veterans, the banks pressing foreclosure no longer actually hold the mortgages.
In fact, recent studies have shown that in order to “cut corners,” banks and mortgage companies have lost track of who actually is ultimately responsible.
Courts, on the other hand, respond to often illegal foreclosure filings, throwing family after family on the street without adequate legal documentation, either of mortgage procedures or in violation of state laws that in many cases protect veterans from foreclosure while serving during wartime, and this is certainly wartime.
In 2010 alone, military families that turned to the Homeowners Assistance Program, still lost their homes to foreclosure.
A spot check of military foreclosures under HEP only in regions adjacent to military bases showed 20,000 foreclosures of homes thought to be protected by special military family guarantees.
With the government often tied directly to the banks, lets name them:
Good Old B of A
Bank of America
Wells Fargo
JP Morgan/Chase (Rothschild)
OneWest(IndyMac)
CitiGroup
HSBC
MetLife
Lehman Brothers
Sovereign
Everbank
Recently the Obama administration has created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau tasked with looking out for the interests of military families who have fallen victim to predatory lending practices and illegal foreclosures.
However, Republicans in congress are holding up funding for this organization. They feel that military families should be able to “fend for themselves” in the “free marketplace.”
Veterans Home Protection Not Working
What Republican legislators fail to disclose is that the banks whose illegal practices have targeted veterans are also heavily supporting GOP candidates.
What is sadder still is that the majority of military families support the same candidates that are actively supporting the institutions who are involved in illegally taking their homes and destroying their families.
Call this “poor access to information” as is so often the case through the Pentagon Channel, the Armed Forces Network, CNN and Fox News, the only “approved” sources for information for our troops and their families.
Currently, over 28 percent of all homes in America have been foreclosed on, military and veterans families are well above that number.
....
Hidden Wounds of Combat
The medications have been administered to treat Post Traumatic Stress but government psychiatrists increasingly diagnose bi-polar disorder, pre-existing personality disorders or general depression even if the soldier involved has spent 5 or more tours in a combat zone.
Veterans go several directions. 26,000 were punitively dismissed with no benefits, most due to behavioral difficulties tied to combat stress.
Hundreds of thousands more have been diagnosed with “unrelated psychiatric conditions” which deny them compensation.
This assumes that military recruiters must have been visiting mental institutions rather than public schools. Humor? Perhaps.
Saddest of all, and the tie in to the foreclosure crisis is the 500,000 veterans, most with families, half with families in the middle of stress or dissolution, that have been forced to wait one to 5 years while simple forms and evaluation visits and processed by the Department of Veterans Affairs whose history is to deny all claims.
In one case, we found a veteran with 40 percent of his brain removed found to be healthy and employable. He was also missing his right arm. The physician who examined him over looked the arm and failed to note the cognitive degeneration the traumatic brain injury had caused.