McCain campaign built on the hardships of the people of Michigan

The headquarters of the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket in Michigan, located at 31330 Northwestern Highway in Farmington Hills in suburban Detroit, is owned by a law firm called Trott & Trott that specializes in housing foreclosures.

As the Republican nominee makes his first post-convention appearance in Sterling Heights, Mich., today, the livelihood of his local host has not yet attracted much notice. But if the Trott name rings no bells among the national press corps, it is all too familiar to the record number of Michigan residents facing foreclosures on their homes in this election year.

McCain’s landlord boasts of providing “comprehensive foreclosure, bankruptcy litigation and related services for the real estate finance industry.”

That means that as the Michigan housing market goes south, the Trott & Trott firm is prospering. The firm’s founder, David A. Trott, is also donating generously to the McCain campaign.

Trott and his wife Kathleen have given $23,000 to the McCain campaign in 2007-08, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. They gave another $52,400 to the Republican National Committee in May of this year.

Court records show that Trott & Trott works closely with Countrywide, the notorious southern California subprime lender. Countrywide’s lending polices have, by all accounts, played a significant role in the national housing market’s boom and bust cycle of the last two years.

When Countrywide’s borrowers find themselves unable to meet their payments, Trott’s firm helps the lender extract advantage from those who cannot pay the unreasonable terms that they, wittingly or unwittingly, signed up for. There’s nothing illegal about Trott & Trott’s business but the firm has faced scores of lawsuits over its handling of foreclosure cases, according to court records.

Consider the story of 72-year-old Ruby Curl-Pinkins, a disabled senior in Detroit who had paid off her home for 45 years when she succumbed to a too-good-to-be-true loan from Countrywide, according to WDIV, the NBC station in Detroit.

Unable to keep up with the 10 percent mortgage payments and her medical bills, Curl obtained a reverse mortgage to pay off the subprime loan in full. Countrywide, represented by Trott & Trott, refused to take the reverse mortgage money, according to the Michigan Citizen, an African-American weekly in Detroit.

“They acted like the situation was personal,” Curl-Pinkins daughter said. “At one point they told me, ‘You better quit filing stuff or you’ll be paying our attorney fees,’ and demanded $900 for that day from us. They tried to bully [Wayne County Circuit Court] Judge Susan Borman, objecting to giving us any more time before the eviction. They wanted my mother out in 24 hours. They told the judge they didn’t even have a buyer, they just wanted the house back.”

Obama will be in Farmington Hills next week, and I hope that everyone will be aware of this by then, as well as the fact that David Trott of Trott and Trott is a McCain 'bundler' as reported by the McCain campaign website.

-Diane