Happy, Hollow Weenies

Meet the Buffalo law firm of Steven J. Baum, where the specialization is helping banks with foreclosure law and the annual Halloween costume party shows just how the employees feel about the "home ownership society" as I give Joe Nocera a second chance after last week's Bork idiocy.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

These pictures are hardly the first piece of evidence that the Baum firm treats homeowners shabbily — or that it uses dubious legal practices to do so. It is under investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. It recently agreed to pay $2 million to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York.” (In the press release announcing the settlement, Baum acknowledged only that “it occasionally made inadvertent errors.”) 

It seems Nocera can at least spot some of the bad guys when they are on his regular NY Times business beat, but he still has problems with the politics of it all, not really mentioning the banks that are of course the real source of all the arrogance and misery that he chides the Baum firm for.  He also ends the piece with the standard "you should look at the pictures and judge for yourself" cop-out.

For an opinion piece, Nocera is certainly careful not to have too much of an actual opinion, lest he anger the corporate overlords he normally deals with as a business reporter.  Funny how that works.