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August 21, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN--It isn't surprising, what with the world falling apart and all, that the world scarcely noticed that I lost my job as an editor in April 2009. Why should it? I was one of millions of Americans who lost their job that month.
But it mattered to me.
It wasn't all bad. No more early morning commutes. And no more Lisa. Lisa was my boss. My mean boss. My mean and crazy boss. In the long run, I stand to save thousands of dollars on therapy.
In the meantime, however, one visit with HR cost more than half my annual income. (My ex-employer, the Scripps media conglomerate, offered just four weeks severance pay--if I agreed not to work as a journalist for the rest of my life. Needless to say, I refused.) Just like that, I was broke.
The bills, of course, kept coming. Including my home mortgage. Unlike many people, I was conservative. When I bought, in 2004, I put down more than 50 percent of the purchase price. Refusing an adjustable-rate mortgage, I took out a vanilla 30-year fixed-rate mortgage from Chase Home Finance LLC.
My monthly nut, a combined payment of $2200 for the loan plus local property tax, didn't seem so bad in '04. But property taxes went up. Now I'm shelling out over $2700--on half the income. I'm still making my payments on time, but only by borrowing from a home equity line of credit.
I'm not in foreclosure. But it's easy to see how, if this keeps up, I will be. The credit line isn't limitless. The more I borrow, the higher my payments on that. My cash flow is a disaster.
Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles—and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.
Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.
LATE ONE NIGHT IN February 2009, Ariane Ice sat poring over records on the website of Florida's Palm Beach County. She'd been at it for weeks, forsaking sleep to sift through thousands of legal documents. She and her husband, Tom, an attorney, ran a boutique foreclosure defense firm called Ice Legal[1]. (Slogan: "Your home is your castle. Defend it.") Now they were up against one of Florida's biggest foreclosure law firms[2]: Founded by multimillionaire attorney David J. Stern, it controlled one-fifth of the state's booming market in foreclosure-related services. Ice had a strong hunch that Stern's operation was up to something, and that night she found her smoking gun.
It involved something called an "assignment of mortgage," the document that certifies who owns the property and is thus entitled to foreclose on it. Especially these days, the assignment[3] is key evidence in a foreclosure case: With so many loans having been bought, sold, securitized[4], and traded, establishing who owns the mortgage is hardly a trivial matter. It frequently requires months of sleuthing in order to untangle the web of banks, brokers, and investors, among others. By law, a firm must execute (complete, sign, and notarize) an assignment before attempting to seize somebody's home.
A Florida notary's stamp is valid for four years, and its expiration date is visible on the imprint. But here in front of Ice were dozens of assignments notarized with stamps that hadn't even existed until months—in some cases nearly a year—after the foreclosures were filed. Which meant Stern's people were foreclosing first and doing their legal paperwork later. In effect, it also meant they were lying to the court—an act that could get a lawyer disbarred or even prosecuted. "There's no question that it's pervasive," says Tom Ice of the backdated documents—nearly two dozen of which were verified by Mother Jones. "We've found tons of them."
Thursday, April 22 2010 @ 10:48 AM MDT
Contributed by: BMcDonald
Views: 85
This is a great 30 minute video of a rally held recently in Florida with state legislators, attorneys and citizens fighting the banks over their ruthless, fraudulent foreclosure practices. The lady at the end brilliantly sums up the plight of most of the homeowners facing this assault by the bankers.
OneWest Bank has recorded record profits in record time. How are they doing this? Well, if my case is any indication, they are doing it by stealing an enourmous amount of property the do not own and have no right to foreclose on. That is what they have attempted to do to me. I have been fighting them for 8 months challenging their claim that they own my loan. I managed to prove they don't through a Freedom of Information Request to the FDIC. OneWest Bank waltzed into the Public Trustees office
As IndyMac, it sold last year for less than that. Investors win, but the FDIC could still lose nearly $11 billion on bad loans that the Pasadena institution made before its sale.
The billionaires' club of private financiers who took over the remains of IndyMac Bank from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. turned a profit of $1.57 billion last year on the failed mortgage lender -- more than they invested less than a year ago.
Yet under the sale agreement, the federal deposit insurance fund still could lose nearly $11 billion on bad loans that the Pasadena institution made before it was sold last March and renamed OneWest Bank.
"This is one hell of a deal for those owners, but hardly a good deal for the banking industry, which pays the FDIC's bills," said Bert Ely, a longtime consultant to banks.
March 10, 2010 The Power Hour Inteview with Bruce McDonald's Battle With OneWest Bank
Learn about the battle Bruce McDonald has been waging with OneWest bank, one of the most ruthless greedy banks to appear on the scene. This bank was formed by the likes of George Soros and Michael Dell and other Wall Street insiders to gobble up the assets of IndyMac Bank after the FDIC shut them down. OneWest bank is foreclosing on homes and all over the country and the dirty little secret is, OneWest Bank has ZERO financial interest in most of the properties it's STEALING. According to the FDIC, OneWest only owns % of the loans it services. Bruce challenged OneWest's right to foreclose on his home and exposed the FACT that OneWest did not own his loan despite the fact that they insisted they did to the court for seven months. OneWest conspired to commit fraud, committed fraud, stole Bruce's house by selling it at a Trustee sale and then ended up having to confess after being forced to comply with a freedom of information act request to the FDIC.
"When I see that I owe $160,000 on almost a $350,000 home and somebody decides they want to take it -- I wasn't gonna stand for that so I took it down." -- Terry Hoskins, Moscow, Ohio
In Part I, “Scam in the making”, I explained how Wall Street created the U.S. housing-bubble and its concurrent Ponzi-scheme – with the full assistance of its accomplices: U.S. rating agencies and U.S. regulators. I also explained why it had to be obvious before they started creating this bubble that it would end with an unprecedented wave of foreclosures.
Because a big part of the bubble/Ponzi-scheme was “mortgage securitization” (which meant the bank originating the mortgage no longer held title to the mortgage), and because the U.S. financial crime syndicate knew there would be a huge wave of foreclosures, it had to invent an entity which could serve as a proxy in foreclosure proceedings – representing all of the players in these debt “daisy-chains”.
This was why MERS was created in 1995. As I wrote in Part I, MERS is nothing more than a confidential electronic registry which exists only to “track mortgages and the changes of servicing rights and mortgage ownership”. In other words, it has no proprietary interest in these mortgages.
The reason why that last fact is so important is because of the fact that Wall Street had created such convoluted chains of “ownership” that even in court proceedings the banksters are unable to show any party in these chain of transactions as having clear title to the mortgage. Wall Street's plan was to send MERS (nothing but a glorified, electronic clerk) to all these foreclosure proceedings and allow MERS to act as if it was the mortgage-holder in these proceedings.
A thanks to Edward Harrison who publishes the blog “Creditwritedowns.com” for his superb explanation of foreclosure and title issues dealing with “foreclosed” properties – in his commentary “What are the legal rights of lenders and homeowners in foreclosure?” It was that article which inspired me to write about some of the legal ramifications, based upon his research and analysis.
There is a lot of material in Mr. Harrison's commentary, so for those interested in this issue, I recommend going to the source to read it in full. I intend to focus on two of the extremely important issues in that piece: the question of who holds title to a securitized mortgage, and (just as important) who has “standing” to initiate and prosecute a foreclosure.
For people with no familiarity with legal jargon, who has “standing” in a legal proceeding is a question of “proximity” to the case before the court. The test for this issue generally being some direct proprietary interest.
The problem for the Wall Street oligarchs, as they began to hatch their schemes to create the U.S. housing bubble (and their own, concurrent Ponzi-scheme) centered on the importance of their new “invention”: mortgage “securitization”. It is this “securitization” which was the key to creating the U.S. housing-bubble from the supply side – rather than most asset-bubbles which are (at least initially) fueled by demand.
Most people don't know the Federal Reserve is controlled by the largest private banks. They are using their control of the Fed to destroy the dollar, our economy and wipe out the middle class so they can replace it with a system and currency they have even MORE control of. If we don't shut down the bankers, the Federal Reserve, this nation is history! The Congress can REPEAL THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT and return control over our currency to "We The People." We have to take back control of Congress and DEMAND THIS HAPPEN in the upcoming election!
Be a courageous
Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles—and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.
This is a great 30 minute video of a rally held recently in Florida with state legislators, attorneys and citizens fighting the banks over their ruthless, fraudulent foreclosure practices. The lady at the end brilliantly sums up the plight of most of the homeowners facing this assault by the bankers. 
