August 6, 2007 (LPAC)--Advocacy groups are beginning to target Wall Street's scam, the "securitization" of mortgages as one of the biggest threats to homeowners in the lower 80% income brackets. A front page article in the New York Times exposes how "mortgage backed securities," the financiers' "merry-go-round" has led to more poor people losing their homes because they were lured into taking out Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), which are then pooled and sold as securities. Homeowners who fall behind in payments are finding it impossible to try to refinance at more favorable terms--because it would "cut into the profits" of the MBS investors--who are at the end of a five level process increasingly in the hands of private Wall Street firms. In addition, the company that collects the mortgages, and the other four levels of companies taking a cut, say that they are legally able to refinance. According to Karen Keefe, the executive director of Americans for Fairness in Lending--a group that has testified before the House Financial Service Committee--that the securitization practice is biased against the borrower, and only cares about "profit and how are we going to secure ourself against risk."

But the New York Times is many months behind Lyndon LaRouche's LPAC, whose youth organizers took the lead in passing a resolution outlawing foreclosures on homes through the Massachusetts State Democratic Party convention on May 19, 2007, and through the Los Angeles Democratic Central Committee in June. As LPAC has been warning, there is no area of the country immune from this looting. Today, Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) announced that the House Committee on Financial Services will hold an official hearing entitled The Effect of Predatory Lending and the Foreclosure Crisis on Twin Cities Communities on August 9th. This hearing, open to the public, comes on the heels of the Minneapolis bridge disaster which has the population up in arms.