Whoops! It is apparently Not Okay as of “since Occupy Wall Street started” for the sadistic owner of a foreclosure mill to openly mock the struggling families it makes truckloads of money throwing out of their homes by forcing its employees to costume themselves as homeless people for Halloween, so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac decided to “evict” the law firm of Steven J. Baum from its referral list, for not having the decency of every other government-supported jillion-dollar corrupt business to just have their laffs at the poor in private. Without all these referrals, the firm is being forced to close down.
From the Buffalo News:
This month, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage- finance companies operating under U.S. conservatorship, dropped Steven J. Baum PC from their lists of law firms eligible to handle foreclosures. Servicers including Bank of America Corp. and Ally Financial Inc. also stopped using the firm, which last month agreed to pay the U.S. $2 million and change its practices to resolve a probe of faulty foreclosure filings.
“Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people is extremely painful, but the loss of so much business left us no choice but to file these notices,” Steven J. Baum, who owns the firm, said in the statement.
Yes, it IS very sad that these people are all losing their jobs, which we sincerely hope they hated anyway, because Steven J. Baum is the only actual person who deserved to lose his job, for being Satan. [Buffalo News]
{ 166 comments }
Now they can wear their costumes for realz.
And just in time for a hopefully colder than usual winter in Buffalo.
I was born in Buffalo. I'm one of those crazy people who likes snow.
I love snow. We should start a club. I don't, however, particularly like Buffalo. Hope that's not a requirement of the club.
What are you thoughts on Bison?
I like snow, too. As long as it stays in Buffalo. Or, closer to home, up on Mt. Charleston.
I like snow, too, but Buffalo is way, way, way too much snow. lol
i went to school in Buffalo one year. never knew there was that much in the world.
Good thing they bought their hobo clothes ahead of time.
Great! Maybe now they can dress up as assholes!
But they won't be able to afford the look of a bank CEO.
Karma's a bitch.
Only to people who deserve it.
And, for once, her aim is true and timely.
You read my mind, 911!
Beat me!
Karma' a bitch who just foreclosed on your ass.
My karma hit their dogma.
yup. and revenge is a Muthahumper
Another firm closing down? Great, the legal market is already over-saturated as it is making really tough for us JDs to find a decent job.
If you're not world famous for being incompetent, unethical, and a rampaging asshole, you have a competitive advantage over these folks.
Like they'd leave the paradise that is Buffalo, (in winter), to compete with you!
Silly, Soros!
Baum's away!
I think Nelson Muntz said it best when he said…A-Ha!
unemployed douchebags is actually helpful to the economy
"Steven J. Baum PC"
Ha! Not so much.
I thought PC stood for Prickheaded Creep.
His title at the firm: Principal Cretin.
Now they can spend more time with their families.
…under an overpass.
It's a wonderful life.
Tell them to go see Herman Cain. He has a job for them.
And if Mr. Cain doesn't, then it is Steven's fault he got the Baum's Rush.
I bet those 2 women in the picture could get a "job" from him, yes.
But, only for the white women.
Bummer. Well there goes Steven J.'s Wall Street / K Street ticker tape parade. Maybe FOX has a job for the poor bastard.
Why doesn't Cluster Fox interview him ranting and raving about paying for your neighbor's house your neighbor can't afford and then he can become even more famous? This could be the birth of the Douche Bag Party.
What do you call 100 lawyers from the Steven J Baum firm lying on the ocean floor??
A good start.
Of course, they are 'lying'.
Well, duh!
I have a feeling Lady Karma especially enjoyed herself with this one.
No doubt she had to go rub one out after doling out that particular dose.
Tonight they're gonna party like it's 1933.
Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people is extremely painful
Really? I thought that was your business model.
Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people without getting paid for it is extremely painful.
Fixed if for ya, ya Baum. Yer welcome.
Allahu Akbar
"Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people is extremely painful …
… but hey, it was our business model," Baum said.
"This will hurt me more than it hurts you?"
Who else said that?
Dick Cheney?
"This will hurt you a lot more than it's gonna hurt me, so, meh."
Jeffrey Dahmer?
Me. For the lulz.
Too weird, "Hong Kong Pizza King" just closed down in my town this weekend as well. What are the odds of that happening?
"Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people is extremely painful"
Why don't they all just go get jobs?
#Occupy a dumpster!
They would need to shower?
Oh, and I don't think I agree with this:
"Yes, it IS very sad that these people are all losing their jobs, which we sincerely hope they hated anyway, because Steven J. Baum is the only actual person who deserved to lose his job, for being Satan."
Anybody who mocked the innocent victims of this financial debacle by dressing up as a hobo and partying the night away deserves whatever shitstorm befalls him. The boss was a dick, but it appears that the employees weren't much better and they deserve a helluva lot worse than having to stand in the unemployment line.
One would hope that these people would learn a life lesson from this, but it's highly doubtful.
They probably consider themselves as casualties in the class war.
Satan libel! But, eh, I'm used to it — and besides, my army of lawyers always has room for new recruits.
Is <a href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_von_Bek" > Ulrich von Bek still on your payroll?
That putz? We let him go, after we found out he was freelancing on our dime.
They would make excellent Gingrich campaign workers.
But, who will foreclose on their homes?
Oh, don't worry. There's plenty of Vulture Capitalists out there these days.
Oh, sweet sweet irony……
I hope they didn't throw away their Halloween costumes and props!
I hope their houses get forclosed.
Then they can camp in a park somewhere and then get pepper sprayed.
Enjoy your soup kitchen Thanksgiving, nouveau Hobos! And try not to get stabbed!
Is there anything worse than a nouveau hobo? Gauche.
Hahaha, suck it!
God, I love it when Karma kicks ass!
Mocking the poors and making all your monies off the tax dollars of American citizens via the evil government, (where most of it goes to some Randian Fucktard) is the American Way(TM). The invisble hand and the "free" market have spoken!
Not fair!! They know where all of the UnOccupied houses are… they can break in and stay there.
All the un-occupied houses in Buffalo? Close your eyes and pick any house.
You'll be right more than half the time.
Welcome to the reality you helped create, assholes. And here's a little survival tip — when you're making conversation at the soup kitchen, you might want to say you did something besides work as a foreclosure lawyer — like maybe say instead that you were a concentration camp guard.
Or maybe a Penn State assistant coach.
Weaker Boener's spray-tanner
Kitten exterminator.
Rat dick salter.
Did I do that right?
Scott Norwood.
LOL! Bills humor!
College-student-pepper-sprayer
ROTFLMAO!
So I guess there aren't enough foreclosures going on… well… anymore.
Maybe their kids will let them take over their janitorial jobs at the local school.
At least Newt got his… Historian pay.
Everyone knows the big money is in being a Historian. Why do you think they get all the hot chicks.
I wonder if Grover Norquist's Think Tank is hiring?
They can't afford to create more jobs unless they get more tax cuts.
Hey, now-unemployed assholes who made fun of people that lost their homes: maybe you can go join up at OccupyBuffalo. You got nothing else to do nowadays.
I love how the affidavits and notarizations they filed are referred to as 'faulty' and 'sloppy'.
The correct term is forged. And by submitting them as valid, the attorneys committed perjury.
Just like the use of clubs and pepper spray against OWS may be referred to as "faulty" and "sloppy."
And it 'raises questions' about their methods. Hmmm. Time for a study group.
None of that counts if its for a bank. Where have you been?
Watching helplessly, wailing and gnashing my teeth.
Severance package includes a 2 x 2 piece of cardboard, a black felt tip pen, and a six-pack of reconstituted hobo beans, from China (melamine-enhanced).
Too hot, too cold, or just right, irony is just soooo delicious!!
Please tell me there's an Adopt-a-Cad program for these nouveau poors wherein we can send them Monopoly money and photos of food and clothing in their time of need.
I've got a job for that red head. Tell her she should bring the bottle in the brown paper bag when she reports for duty.
Maybe we could take up a collection, or bring over some food for Baum
I will contribute a sack of lightly salted poisoned rat dicks. I'll even spoon feed the motherfucker.
Schadenfreude sammich.
Sandwich, nothing! This? This is an entire banquet!
This.
I’m kind of surprised they haven’t outsourced foreclosure work to India already.
Servicers including Bank of America Corp. and Ally Financial Inc. also stopped using the firm, which last month agreed to pay the U.S. $2 million and change its practices to resolve a probe of faulty foreclosure filings.
Probably hired illiterate illegal immigrants at less than minimum wage to fill out the forms.
Maybe sign-holding chick can steal some cardboard-colored white-out as she leaves the office and change her sign.
Ha ha – Bummer to be Baum….fuck off dicksuckers! Bye Bye!
This is my favorite: "In the wake of those photos and national stories, politicians, consumer advocates, and even other attorneys denounced him for a lack of sensitivity, and the mortgage industry quickly began to distance itself."
Even other attorneys! Hahahahaha!
Hey maybe Newt will become president and change the child labor laws so their pre-teen children can get jobs and support them.
Are there no prisons or workhouses? Surely they all will be fine.
If they just work hard enough. If not, they were just lazy anyway.
Yeah, on the one hand it's nice of some people to want to blame the owners more than the wage-earners. On the other hand, if you choose to work for a foreclosure mill, that's exactly what you've done – choose. Maybe no other job was [easily] available right then; but anyone who claims they were forced to take an evil job, unless it was literally at gunpoint, is just too effing lazy to face the inconvenience of changing their lives in whatever ways necessary to keep from screwing their fellow man… for money.
I would hit the one on the left. Now that she will soon be homeless, maybe I stand a better chance, what with having a house and an ample supply of hobo beans.
Is it legal to entice sexy-sexy with Hobo Beans? Must they be warmed up?
Edit: I pre-edited my next thought. It was just to rude for Wonkette.
Too rude for Wonkette?
You need a quick scouring with some brain bleach, child.
As an attorney yourself, do you take a sanguine view of the firm's activities? And did you read the unintentionally hilarious article in yesterday's NYT about how law firms have to spend two years training new graduates how to file papers and do other practical law thingies because they spend their entire law-school careers as slave labor in the law-review content-generation mines?
Law school is the ultimate example of the old saw, "Those who can't do, teach."
(I LOLd at the anonymous prof who observed "… the academy wants people who are not sullied by the practice of law.")
Fact is, the 'second tier' schools do teach practical law … but the fancy firms don't hire from those schools.
"Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people is extremely painful, but the loss of so much business left us no choice but to file these notices”
Want to know what's even more painful? Being thrown out of your house without proper due process, for starters…
Glad to hear this firm is gone. Now, on to Skank of America…
Let us not forget that these unfortunate new jobless folks are people, too, and deserving of our thoughts in their time of need. My thought: Screw them.
All together now: A-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
It's funny when bad shit happens to deserving people.
"The schaden freudes itself", I like to say.
~
The unemployed hobos formerly of Steven J. Baum Law Firm PC will be enjoying a big plate of roasted crow instead of brine soaked turkey this Thanksgiving. Welcome to the disenfranchised class assholes!
“While Dorothy was looking earnestly into the queer, painted face of the Scarecrow, she was surprised to see one of the eyes slowly wink at her. She thought she must have been mistaken at first, for none of the scarecrows in Kansas ever wink; but presently the figure nodded its way down from the fence and walked up to it, while Toto ran around the pole and barked.”
Maybe they can take a bath then get a job as pepper spray dispensers. They have experience after all. Fuckwits.
This makes me so very happy.
Hey, my tax dollars no longer go to these twisted losers? Well, there's a thanksgiving treat.
"Welcome to the Steven J. Baum Soup Kitchen"
Takes one up the Baum. One time, two time, three time more.
So, next Halloween they'll dress up like homeless lawyers?
The owner blames the media, natch
Well OF COURSE it's the media's fault. Without the damn lying liberal media, the shitbags would get away with all their shit.
I think Joe Nocera "foreclosed" in his pants when he read that email:
Mr. Nocera — You have destroyed everything and everyone related to Steven J. Baum PC. It took 40 years to build this firm and three weeks to tear down.
I would totally gay-marry Joe Nocera after reading that article.
This Thanksgiving, I will say a grateful prayer to the magic, baby Santa Jeebus for giving the cocksuckers at Steven J. Baum Law Firm PC a big helping of Karma.
Baum was just carrying out orders.
Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, you know who else was just carrying out orders?
UCD Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike?
Karma has a fleet of dump trucks they fill everyday with fresh shit, evidently Steven J. Baum PC were on the list of deliveries. Merry christmas assholes. I made a few signs for the newly unemployed Steven J. Baum PC crew. They say 'WILL SUCK COCK FOR FOOD'!
I'm sure they'll all get jobs writing about economics for The Atlantic.
OMFG…look at the rationale in this comment from a Baum sympathizer or whatever:
Okay, who is going to handle the foreclosures for the banks that actually did the robosigning now. Someone needs to handle foreclosures or does one not need to pay a mortgage. Now you have hundreds more without jobs ..more diarrhea
Two words: bootstraps baby
If I were that commenter, I'd be more concerned about all of our country's robosigning jobs getting outsourced.
Oh yea, she's the same tourism booster who bitched at the Buffalo News for basically forcing people out of the city. The stupidity, it astounds.
Sounds like the sanitation department could be hiring.
I would be a bit more verbose: "get a job after you take a bath."
OK, Grammar Nazi time!
While we enjoy our schadenfreude at this news, please remember that this is neither irony nor karma. Irony would have been their office getting foreclosed upon, and karma would have been falling off a ladder and breaking a bone or two.
Rather, the source of our pleasure is "they broke the law and got fined into oblivion," as well as "biting the hand that feeds you by pissing off the public when your main clients are government-sponsored."
We now return to your regularly scheduled comments.
Irony would have been their office getting foreclosed upon
Give it a couple months and I'm sure there will be proper irony.
On the other hand, this is precisely what happens when Karma decides to be ironic.
"Karma" means "action." As in, what you do is what you get. Thus, by participating gleefully and willingly in the creation of home loss for others who fell on hard times, now they indeed might also experience the same. So yeah, karma, pretty much.
I, for one, fucking love it.
Baum said, from his compound in the Caymans.
115 Comments down and nobody said it? Well done, Wonkette. Don't know exactly what the procuring cause of this Hellish cult's demise was, but the Mighty W. was in there pitching and I for one, appreciate it.
Gosh, you mean that being a bit over zealous and overstepping your duties and mocking the people you are booting out of their homes might make you less appealing as a business? Who Da Thunkit? If ever an enterprise deserved to swirl down the bowl and into the economic sewer, these lovely folk do. It sounds like the parties were a pretty damned good time while they lasted, but they didn't and the world is a better place with this lot thrown on the ash heap of history and us moving along. I would say that I wish them well, but frankly, I wish them as well as those they wronged the most. Here's hoping the burn is long and unpleasant.
Sounds like Baum is crying about the magic of the free market.
Generally, I feel bad for people that are losing their jobs, especially as the Holiday Season begins. Seriously, I don't know how many times I've seen companies announce that they intend to close the doors or issue massive layoffs, shortly after the first of the new year. And they always manage to do it sometime after Labor Day.
But not this time. Fuck you, you fucking fucks. And I hope someone recognizes you standing in line at the Food Stamp office and kicks you square in the fucking head.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne (1572-1631)
Old lesson, painfully relearned.
Poor Stephen J Baum will have to retire now and think of ways he can spend his millions and millions dollars of ill-gotten wealth in Bali.
Maybe he'll blow it all at Thai Ladyboy bars?
word is Newt is hiring.
you would ALL seem to fit in with him.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS, ALSO
This must be a holiday collaboration: Fake bums on Halloween – Real bums on Thanksgiving. There's no way they can be otherwise on another holiday, except that they're just bums on every regular day of the year.
i wish i could find pictures like this about my old company.
i know they exist.
The irony; she burns! Yes, disrupting the livelihoods of so many customers is extremely painful. Now, you know how it feels. Eat your sin; eat it up with a fuckin' spoon and like it.
Shit just got real, didn't it, Baum?
I love poetic justice! I believe if karma! I remember what being homeless did to me. I find myself supporting putting these people out of work. I would never hirer them. Their victims may never go home again but justice has found a beginning perhaps for the first time in a very long time.
RUN SCHADENFREUDE.EXE
… & nothing of value was lost.
Eagerly awaiting follow-up story of staffers SHOCKED that another pack of bipedal jackals have just foreclosed on their bungalow.
PROTIP: the squatting-spots located over or adjacent to heating ducts are prime real-estate.
"But what may have hastened the firm's demise were photos that recently emerged into the national spotlight from the firm's Halloween party last year, at which Baum employees dressed up as foreclosure victims and attorneys, mocking and ridiculing them."
Sweet, sweet schadenfreude….
YUMMY!
You do have to adjust the rib recipe, it's a very lean meat. But tasty, as teebob has already said.
Tomorrow, as I do every Thanksgiving, I am making lunch for the crew. Each year I make Stew (to the count of two huge slow cookers).
Sadly, the company has outgrown Two Cookers Stew (I am too cheap to buy a third cooker) and I will make Red Beans and Rice.
Looking to the future, if we continue to grow…I fear I will just throw crackers at them and douse them with spray cheese.
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