Tea Partiers Have a Very Mixed-Up Notion of What the American Revolution Was About

By William Hogeland, NewDeal 2.0
Posted on March 1, 2011, Printed on March 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150097/

Note: Think the Tea Party has a monopoly on American history and values? Think again. With 'Founding Finance', the Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 blog reclaims the progressive narrative from the earliest days of the Republic, showing how ordinary Americans bravely stood up to financial elites. Tune in every Monday for author William Hogleand's rousing stories of our forbears who fought for economic prosperity.

“I got debts that no honest man can pay … ”~~Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”

O. Max Gardner III, a patrician lawyer in Shelby, North Carolina, has started a movement for resisting home mortgage foreclosures.

In what Reuters describes as “legal jiu jitsu,” Gardner teaches techniques for using a bank’s lumbering hugeness to enable people to stay in their homes long after banks want them gone. He’s not alone. A foreclosure resistance movement has gained national traction in the past year. The Times has reported on local sheriffs’ refusals to evict, and in an especially pointed act of guerilla theater, Patrick Rodgers of Philadelphia recently turned the tables on Wells Fargo by starting a foreclosure against the bank’s local mortgage office. According to ABC News, the bank had not paid Rodgers a court-ordered judgment it sustained in the process of failing to respond to his demand under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) for information about his mortgage. Rodgers thought his foreclosure gesture would at least get the bank’s attention.