We're still shaking our heads at
this story in the
Bay Citizen: apparently it's perfectly okay in Berkeley these days to be a deadbeat on your mortgage and break into a property you've been evicted from, as long as union thugs are willing to back you up.
The mortgage deadbeat in this case is Tanya Dennis (pictured on the left), a former high school vice principal in Oakland. About a year and a half ago, Wells Fargo foreclosed on her home in South Berkeley, and Alameda County Sheriff's deputies were called in to evict her. Her response? Hiring a locksmith and breaking back into her old home, and suing Wells Fargo in federal court. When her suit was tossed out, she called in the goon squad, in this case the Oakland teachers' union. Assisted by the union and an ACORN-associated community group, she publicly ripped bank officials and got state lawmakers to lobby on her behalf. Eventually, Wells Fargo tired of the bad press, because they've apparently agreed to write down over 20% of the principal on the mortgage, eating a loss of $119,000. This will drop Dennis's mortgage payments by $500 per month.
At this point, we don't see why Dennis doesn't just keep the pressure on and try to force Wells Fargo to take a loss on the rest of the principal. We've already established that breaking into a property you don't own and reneging on the terms of an agreement you willingly signed are perfectly fine as long as you have the right political connections. Why not follow the logic through to its conclusion and just declare that people with the right friends in Sacramento should be given free houses at the expense of lenders?
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