Matt Tiabbi investigating foreclosures

This story is from the November 25, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. 
Written by Matt Taibbil

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

Chris here-  a  part I want to emphasize: 

----judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench.----------

 The financial industry has used new vocabulary terms, new formulas and lack of transparency to to keep people on the outside from knowing what types of risk they were taking on the inside.  It is a long history of manipulation by the industry to allow Wall Street to gamble with other people's money in order to collect millions of dollars in salary and pay out a nominal return to the average investor.  If it is better than the going rate of a Certificate of Deposit, most people are happy if their investment continues to compound year after year.  People have been willing to accept whatever garbage Wall Street throws at them.  In part due to the smoke screen of complexity that financial institutions use so well, and partly due to being brainwashed that the people on Wall Street are just so much smarter than the rest of us. 
Read More Here at More Financial Reality