Tennessee Banksters Finance Major Campaign To Make Easy Foreclosures Even Easier Throughout State

The Knoxville News Sentinel reports:

• Legislation to cut back on the number and length of home foreclosure legal notices now required in Tennessee is being pushed by bankers who stand to save money if the bill passes and opposed by newspapers that stand to lose money.
• While that is clear, the two sides - both aided by a contingent of lobbyists - clashed sharply over whether the proposed change would benefit financially strapped homeowners and the general public as the bill advanced in the House last week.
• As drafted and introduced at the behest of the Tennessee Bankers Association, HB1920 would require that just one notice of a pending foreclosure be published in a newspaper based in the county where the property is located.
• Current law requires three notices. That has been the case for more than 125 years in Tennessee, according to Steve Baker, a Nashville foreclosure attorney who testified before committee in support of sticking with the "tried and true" three-time publication rule.

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• Indeed, others say that, politically speaking, legislators may have more to fear from the bankers who collectively gave more than $200,000 to state political candidates last year, according to a review of records by The Tennessean. That includes $184,750 donated by the Tennessee Bankers Association political action committee to candidates for the Legislature.

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• [H]enry Hildebrand, a bankruptcy trustee in Middle Tennessee, told legislators that he has seen "hundreds" of cases over the past 20 years of legally defective foreclosure moves by banks that were never detected until they reached U.S. Bankruptcy Court. He opposed the bill for reducing one of the few safeguards now benefiting homeowners in Tennessee.
• "Tennessee already has one of easiest foreclosure processes in the country for banks," said Mary Mancini, executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action, a consumer advocacy group. "To remove a notice or two in the newspaper, which is still the only source of information from the outside world for some people, is a very bad idea."

For more, see Foreclosure bill fight rages (Publishing info in newspapers costly, bankers group says).