Mitt Romney Made Millions Foreclosing on Americans

For the past 12 years, in some form or fashion, Mitt Romney has been trying to persuade people to consider him for any high level political office.  Nowhere have his intentions been more evident than in his quest to grab the holy grail of politics in the U.S. — the presidency. Unfortunately, he is a representation of the knotted and elliptical problem currently manifesting in America. Most of us do not consider earning more than $350,000 in speaking fees as insignificant  money, nor do we have the need for off shore accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg or Switzerland.

According to reports by Think Progress, Romney’s May 2011 personal financial disclosures show that he and his wife, Ann, were able to make large sums of money on the backs of struggling homeowners across the nation by investing millions into a Goldman Sachs fund that invested in mortgage backed obligations, which were owned by financial institutions and banks who foreclosed on thousands across the nation, especially in Floridians.

Ironically, the current GOP candidate did not list the fund on his 2007 financial disclosure forms, meaning that it is logical to reason that he made the investment after the financial meltdown that started near the end of 2008. Maybe this is why his policy position for the foreclosure crisis as suggested last year to the Las Vegas Review Journal was “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

According to his May 2011 financial disclosure forms, Romney and his wife invested at least $2 million in the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class). In 2011, about 24.5 percent of that fund was invested in mortgage backed obligations. with another 8 percent invested in banks. Since the 2008 economic crisis and the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, the fund grew 7.88 percent between April 2010 and March 2011.

Some of the mortgage backed securities comprising the fund included adjustable rate mortgages from Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and Washington Mutual — all of which are companies considered among the top-25 subprime lenders that led to the market’s collapse according to a 2009 Center for Public Integrity report.

Romney, who has not had a regular 40 hour a week job in sometime is not only hypocritical but also out of touch with the main street, blue collar people he is asking to represent in Washington, D.C.  He is a man who asserts that corporations like banks are people, yet he never mentions that he benefited directly from the housing crisis and the bank bailouts from his investments with Goldman Sachs. The looser is the unemployed worker and his family who is thrown in the streets and his home foreclosed on. -torrance stephens