I’ve warned you not to take at face value the depictions of the protesters at the Occupy Wall Street rallies.
Andrew Cole, the focus of a sympathetic New York Times article, turned out to be a pretty hard core solicialist (by his own description) and former operative for a progressive organization, facts not revealed in The Times article.
This video of a law student decrying the loss of his parents home to Chase Bank also made the rounds in late September.
There’s just one problem. The story he tells is a fraud, as an investigation by The Blaze revealed. His parents $500,000 home was not taken by the bank, is not in foreclosure, and the whole thing was street theater:
Phone inquiries into the county property records & taxpayer services office reveal that the Stephens family home is not and never has been in foreclosure, that property taxes had been paid in full this year and the remaining balance on their mortgage for the half-million dollar home is less than one year’s worth of tuition+fees at their son’s law school.
The nail in this empty protest‘s coffin is a delightful phone conversation I just had with Robert’s mother, Marquita, where she admitted Chase Bank indeed was not “taking” their home from them. Instead, due to a recent “reduction in income,” they’ve decided to hold a “short sale.”
Of course, it took alternative conservative media to reveal the fraud.
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If the remaining balance on their mortgage is less than a year of tuition and fees at their kid’s law school, that’s less than $50k, right? Their house may be underwater, but it’s VERY dumb to lose a $500,000ish home to a short sale at that point.
Now, it depends on a lot of variables, like how reduced their income is and how much is left and how much the house is underwater and how much cash out they would get, considering, and if it will go into their retirement and be a good idea for them to move someplace much cheaper.
But it seems real silly.
I don’t know of any place where housing prices have fallen 90%, I’m guessing the mother just doesn’t understand what a real estate short sale is.
Some people use the term “short sale” wrongly to refer to any sale where the house is sold for “less than market value” (i.e. make us an offer and we’ll take it) or “less than we paid for it” (i.e. we’re not making money off that) that doesn’t neccisarily mean they’re under water (if they paid $500K sell for $450k they could pay off their mortgage and downsize.)
Actually downsizing even if you’re mostly paid off isn’t entirely uncommon, some people prefer smaller homes after their children (in this case apparently crazy children) leave. No sense paying property taxes on unused space 😉
NYT’s should change their masthead slogan to ‘All the leftist propaganda we want to print’.
This parent should be talking to her son about the realities of life and one of them is that college costs a bomb so why is he on Wall Street with others who do not face reality either.
So, in addition to being a “law student,” he’s a liar. His law school, their judgment another matter altogether, must be very proud.
But he is lying for what he claims is a good cause, and he has learned from Obama that is all that matters.
Thank you for posting this. I say this as a former disgusted democrat, I truely now am wondering how many lies and falsehoods I believed from the liberal/democrat media, finally now there is the Internet to fight back or at the very least show both sides of the story.
Keep up the great work!
If the Daily Show had the balls they think they have they would run with this story. They would make this guy the poster child for OWS. They would ridicule these yahoos off the street.
But Stewart and Colbert are NOT about “speaking truth to power”. They ARE the power. They are about speaking lies to the masses. Dispensers of the new opiate for the secular religion of no god.
No matter how much truth alternative conservative media reveals the MSM continues their message. That is why they are losing market share on a daily basis. If you value your money you will make sure you pull any money you have invested in companies that own major media news outlets.
The most disturbing part about this is not even the lie: it is the blatant sense of entitlement. Assuming for a minute the false premise that the bank had taken his parents’ home, apparently, “playing by the rules” means that “[his] dad has a Phd, two masters degrees,” etc. (That Phd must not have been in finance or accounting.) Seriously though, because your parents have degrees, it’s “not right” to take their house away?
[…] Legal Insurrection) LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", "other"); […]
Is a defamatory video “slander” or “libel”?
In any case, I’m pretty sure this flasehood fails the “absense of malice” test. I’d love to see Chase Bank sue the pants off this bozo.
Even if they don’t sue, I hope some prospective employer Googles Robert Stephens, graduate of Carleton College and potential graduate of The George Washington University Law School, and discovers the fact that this would-be lawyer not only has ethics that most of us would consider extremely questionable, but possibly has exposed hmself to legal liability for his action … and is, basically, a lying punk.
Robert Stephens. Robert Stephens. Robert Stephens. “Stephens, Robert”
The story he tells is a fraud
We may have a future Democratic president!
[…] I just can’t stop posting about the Occupy Wherever protests. Whenever I think they’ve reached the heights of ridiculousness or hypocrisy, they grab a stepladder and go up a few more feet. They’re throwing jazz hands and creepy chanting in New York. In Georgia, they shut down former civil rights leader and Democratic lion Rep. John Lewis. The anti-Semitism that’s never deeply buried in the progressive movement has popped to the surface and the leaders of the “movement”, unsurprisingly, are not what the MSM told us they were. […]
If he really wanted to help his parents he would transfer to a reasonably priced college. Better yet, quit school and get a J O B.