Your Moment of Schadenfreude

David Dayen notes that, "A Liberal Is a Villager Who’s Been Screwed By a Mortgage Servicer, and if this is the case, Washington Post hard core villager Dana Milbank has just discovered liberalism:

Behind the foreclosure crisis, big banks' reign of error

By Dana Milbank
Sunday, March 6, 2011;

The problem in the nation's housing market now isn't subprime lending. It's subpar lenders.

Last fall, my wife and I refinanced our mortgage with Citibank. Sixty days later, we received a "cancellation notice" from our homeowners insurance company "for non-payment of premium."

Turns out Citibank, which had been collecting hundreds of dollars a month from us to pay the insurer, hadn't made the payments. It was, I later learned, one of the usual tricks mortgage servicers use to squeeze more cash out of their customers. About a month later, I learned of another trick: Citibank informed us that it was increasing our monthly payment by nearly $300.

Along the way, a simple refi became a months-long odyssey: rates misquoted, interest charged on a phantom account, legal documents issued in wrong names, a mortgage officer who disappeared for days at a time (first it was his birthday, then his laptop was in the shop), a bounced check from Citibank's own title company, and the freezing of our bank accounts.

For me, this amounts to no more than the hassle of arguing with Citibank to fix its "mistakes." But consumer advocates tell me these are typical of the screw-ups by the big banks that service home mortgages. And these errors - accidental or otherwise - are driving large numbers of people into default and foreclosure when it otherwise would not have happened.

It's a bad situation - and the new majority in the House is poised to make it even worse.

He got seriously boned by his bank, and now he realizes that it ain't just a bunch of deadbeats who are trying to stiff the banks.

Unfortunately, he's also singing the praises of HAMP, which was clearly constructed for the benefit of the banks at the expense of homeowners by Obama and His Evil Minions^™, so he's still that lovable clueless scamp we've always known.