Happy Halloween, friends!
In a NYTimes Op-Ed, Joe Nocera reported on an office Halloween party in a Buffalo suburb, thrown by the Steven Baum firm, New York’s largest “foreclosure mill”, abetting banks in foreclosing on and evicting homeowners. The fun-loving firm represents virtually all the giant mortgage crooks: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. A former firm employee sent Mr. Nocera snapshots of the company party, that exemplifies the “appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against”. Here are a few (WARNING: MAY CAUSE INTENSE FEELINGS OF RAGE):
Here we have two of Baum’s lower management hags dressed like – hardyharharhar – homeless people. The mean looking one with the bad perm holds a bottle of liquor in a bag. You know, what bums do. The other has a hiLARious sign around her neck mocking the “typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a proceeding that will render him/her homeless. You know what else will be hilarious? Watching their pinheads bounce down Broadway after they fall off of the guillotine platform.
Bleached blonde hagfish pushing a shopping cart instead of a pencil.
A corner of the Baum office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Corporate carpet notwithstanding.
WHY DO THE POORS HATE SUCCESS SO MUCH?
Yikes! Deathwish notice via beige file cabinets (ritual mock murder of a lawyer who has sued the firm for its criminal practices).
Real Foreclosure Photos! (these sad little girls would have made great costumes for the secretaries):
Ah, Poverty! The accent for the emotional and aesthetic bankruptcy of the suburbs!
Other party pictures show mock homeless camps, foreclosure signs, attorneys dressed as bums and squatters in what is referred to as – hardyharharhar – “Baum Estates” — a row of faux-foreclosed homes. Fun-gone-too-far, party levity/macabre humor associated with high stakes tension, or decrepitude of the soul indicator? Well, the idiots pictured look like low wage earners. Administrative assistants, secretaries, file clerks and paralegals (god forbid there are litigators amongst this sorry lot). SPray tans, bad perms and horrible dye jobs. They are lowly office workers in a crap suburb of a horrible city, and are all probably much closer to economic catastrophe than they know. American nobodies, people as likely to fall prey to an aggressive foreclosure mill as the actual victims. The fear of their own homelessness forces them to report to work to this hellhole every morning. However, I’m wondering who forced them to go to this party, to parade about as caricatures of their own victims, as their future selves.
Predictably, the Steven Baum firm is under investigation by the NY Attorney General and the country’s “Top U.S. Foreclosure Practice” – i.e. Top-Down Criminal Organization – was recently made to fork over $2 million in fines to avoid further prosecution over its criminal foreclosure methods and resolve a Justice Dept probe into whether the crooked firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York”.
Just like the Wall Street balcony champagne toasters, these losers have to be staggeringly moronic. Arrogance is seldom associated with social intelligence or the capacity to act like a decent human being. But blaming people for their suffering by mocking their condition is really the nadir of ignorant narcissism. it’s really no different than blaming the crime victim, or attacking peaceful demonstrators, or wounding an American serviceman who survived war, only to be critically injured at home, by his own should-be protectors, while exercising the democracy he fought to make secure for all of us.
The very punchable mug of Steven J Baum
I guess the dehumanization rituals are the only way Steven Baum’s employees sleep at night, considering what their day jobs are. Like slaughtering people in war, I suppose putting people out on the street, by hook or crook, is easier to digest by first dehumanizing them through ridicule. But christ, it’s hard to wrap my head around. The people in these photos are so depressing. On one hand, I wish we had a Robespierre, a vain little fop, sent to the law firm of Steven J Baum, consigning the despicable, degenerate, bottom-feeding scum – from cubicle to copy room – to a tumbrel for an appointment with the National Razor. On the other hand, I take pity on this motley collection of sad, 7th tier, ambulance chasing losers. They are victims of the same system which helped frontload the framework of banal oppression that defines this ruined country…..only in America could proletariat wage slaves be given the same opportunity as rich people to grow up shallow and cruel.
Contact the Steven J Baum firm HERE