The Mortgage Crisis. Putting Wall Street Ahead of Main Street Hits Home

Statement

The Mortgage Crisis. Putting Wall Street Ahead of Main Street Hits Home

For too long the Bush Republicans in Washington have allowed giant corporate interests like Enron and Halliburton to run wild. And middle class and working families paid the price.

That price keeps going up with the news of perhaps the most serious scandal so far -- the subprime mortgage crisis.

While President Bush looked the other way, Wall Street used mortgages to back shaky investment schemes while some lenders scammed consumers who could have qualified for safer mortgages.

Washington's enabling of corporate greed has truly hit home. This year as many as 16,500 homeowners in New Jersey will face foreclosure as a result of these high-cost, subprime loans.

So my Senate colleagues and I have developed a plan to deal with current foreclosures and prevent future ones.

Our plan helps individual families with counseling on how to avoid foreclosure, reforms bankruptcy laws and makes mortgage documents simpler and more transparent so consumers can't be tricked into agreeing to bad terms.

Our plan helps communities by providing funds to rehabilitate foreclosed homes so they can be rented or quickly re-sold rather than staying vacant and hurting neighborhoods. It's common sense and it needs to be passed quickly.

Yet President Bush is vowing to veto these reforms and leave homeowners more desperate than ever. He's wrong and we need to let him know it.

Please join me and sign my petition [http://www.democratsenators.org/o/19/t/69/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=93] in standing up to President Bush and his wrongheaded insistence on siding with the corporate interests who created the foreclosure mess, instead of helping families hit hard by this crisis.

Source