Norman and Oriane Rousseau were one more couple pushed by a huge, greedy bank to the brink of homelessness. On Sunday, desperate and with nowhere to go, Norman Rousseau shot himself.

This is the story of what happens when an average couple is up against a giant, wealthy, powerful bank. Unfortunately the result is what the result always is when people are on their own against the wealthy and powerful: the bank ends up with all of their money, takes their house to sell and throws them out onto the street. In this case the bank is Wells Fargo.

The quick version of this terrible story is that Norman and Oriane Rousseau of Newbury Park, California were scammed into a predatory mortgage. But they made their payments anyway, always paying with a cashier’s check in person at the same branch. Then one day the bank misapplied their payment and said they still owed the money. This started a long, nasty process that led to the bank evicting the Rousseaus from their home.

Here’s the shocker: right at the start the Rousseaus came up with proof that the bank had received the payment and had cashed the check. But the bank continued to claim it had missed the payment, gave the Rousseaus the runaround, started applying fees, and used it as an excuse to foreclose on the house anyway.

The Rousseaus fought back, the bank dragged it out for so long and pulled so many tricks, getting its way every step of the process, until this last Sunday Norman Rousseau finally gave up and shot himself in despair – two days before the scheduled eviction, Tuesday, May 15.

Source

And the sickest thing about all of this is that NO ONE at Wells Fargo will see a day of prison time over this or even be held legally responsible for it.

This is the financial system that Republicans want us to believe is not only NOT broken, but needs LESS regulation as it is.

How many more Norman Rousseaus are out there? How many Americans are hopelessly fighting big banks to deal with mortgages that those same banks screwed them into the first place?

I STRONGLY recommend reading the full summary from the link. It reveals Wells Fargo deliberately inflated Rousseau’s income on the paperwork to get him into a larger mortgage that they could levy more fees on.

This is the America some on the right love so dearly.