Tuesday, October 19, 2010

You can help people save their homes!

The following is a message that was sent to me relating to my latest blog posts that involving the Megabank Lenders, their use of the "MERS" (Mortgage Electronic Registration System) system, and how it relates to the exposed crisis and fraud related to foreclosures.
Mr. Shell,

I live in Asheville and have been researching MERS for quit some time. I enjoyed reading your latest blogs. I was wondering if you know of any attorneys in the Western NC area, that actually know about MERS and are willing to represent clients pertaining to MERS? Also, for failure of mortgage services to abide by NC General Statues § 45-93 (Borrower requests for information)?

Can someone help to create a list of contacts (Attorneys and Agencies) who are willing to press this issue. I do not want to limit this to just Western North Carolina. Let us know of anywhere in North Carolina that these services may be available. Please feel free to comment in the comment section below or send me e-mails that will help me relate information to homeowners who might be vulnerable or may want to press this issue. Any and all information related to this topic is welcome.

Please help me put the rubber to the road. I don't want to just talk about this issue. I want to help people who need help saving their home and I want to create a network of connections that will begin to hold Financial Institutions accountable for their malfeasance versus the public. If you have any ideas or information, I plead, please step forward and help. During these times, you don't know what a lifeline this could be for people living on the edge.

E-mail: hickoryhound@gmail.com

Real Terrorism: Financial Terrorism - The Banksters
Time to break the Banksters

2nd wave of the Banking Meltdown is here

How can the United States avoid Bankruptcy?


The Plunge Protection Team and the Ponzi Economy

Monday, October 18, 2010

Real Terrorism: Financial Terrorism - The Banksters

Are you worried about Muslims? Are you worried about Russians? You are willing to have trillions of dollars spent in efforts to thwart these threats?

Yet, you sit back and watch as the Federal Reserve and Megabanks holds us hostage. It has been stated that in mid September 2008 that Henry Paulson and members of the Treasury Department threatened that there would be Martial law unless the TARP Bill was passed in Congress. At the same time, we saw wild gyrations take place in the Stock Market. One such incident occurred when the TARP Bill failed to pass the House the first time and the Stock market went into the tank.

The forces in key positions of the Financial Structure of our country have been pulling strings and colluding with government entities to manipulate the financial markets and by doing so commit fraud, which has cost Americans trillions in real wealth from pension funds and other personal and public financial instruments.

From the New York Times - September 18, 2010 - The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of financial institutions in the United States, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets from the private firms.

Then we saw a change in direction two months later, as reported in the New York Times - November 12, 2008 - Instead, Treasury will step up its program of injecting capital directly into banks and, for the first time, expand it to include financial companies that are not federally regulated banks or thrifts.

You see, the Congress gave the Executive Branch of our Government a blank slate of $700 billion to do with as they saw fit with no checks and balances in place to ensure accountability of money that in the end belongs to the citizens of this nation. The Congress and other members of the Federal government were unwilling to follow Constitutional procedures and Precedence of Law in the administration of governance. This is wrong, because this renders laws and structure meaningless and only empowers special interests who utilize money to consolidate power to elite power brokers.

In the end this creates the oligarchy that so many have spoken of. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. When I look at this debacle related to Real Property and mortgages, I see the same forces at work. Their is a rule of law that has formed around the Universal Commercial Code and Common Law that over centuries has laid out ground rules for a transfer of deed on real property. If you have bought a house and paid the slightest bit of attention, then you understand this.

You do not own your house until the mortgage is paid off, but the lender is supposed to physically hold the deed. The banks found that to be inconvenient in the era of securitization where they wanted to package loans into security instruments and sell them as derivatives. Financial Institutions have once again displayed their ineptitude and they are looking for others to remedy problems that they have created.

From a Maine House, a National Foreclosure Freeze
- New York Times - October 14, 2010
Fannie Mae and GMAC, which serviced the loan for Fannie, have now most likely spent more to dislodge Mrs. Bradbury than her house is worth. Yet for all their efforts, they are not only losing this case, but also potentially laying the groundwork for foreclosure challenges nationwide.

“This ammunition will be front and center in thousands of foreclosure cases,” said Don Saunders of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association....

Mr. Cox vowed to a colleague that he would expose GMAC’s process and its limited signing officer, Jeffrey Stephan. A lawyer in another foreclosure case had already deposed Mr. Stephan, but Mr. Cox wanted to take the questioning much further. In June, he got his chance. A few weeks later, he spelled out in a court filing what he had learned from the robo-signer:

“When Stephan says in an affidavit that he has personal knowledge of the facts stated in his affidavits, he doesn’t. When he says that he has custody and control of the loan documents, he doesn’t. When he says that he is attaching ‘a true and accurate’ copy of a note or a mortgage, he has no idea if that is so, because he does not look at the exhibits. When he makes any other statement of fact, he has no idea if it is true. When the notary says that Stephan appeared before him or her, he didn’t.” ......

But Judge Powers went further than that, saying that GMAC had been admonished in a Florida court for using robo-signers four years ago but had persisted. “It is well past the time for such practices to end,” he wrote, adding that GMAC had acted “in bad faith” by submitting Mr. Stephan’s material:

“Filing such a document without significant regard for its accuracy, which the court in ordinary circumstances may never be able to investigate or otherwise verify, is a serious and troubling matter."

HR 3808 was a bill rushed through the House of Representatives and the Senate that would require any Federal or State court to recognize any notarization made by a notary public licensed by a State other than the State where the court is located when such notarization occurs in or affects interstate commerce.

This bill was sponsored by Robert Aderholdt, a Republican from Alabama and quickly passed the Senate without amendment. How many times does that happen and what was Representative Aderholt's intent?

This bill would force a State to accept notary public signatures of other States. That means if others States accept lower standards for Notary Public signings, then another State would be forced to accept those lower standards. If one State has a regulation that accepts electronic Notary Signings, then all other States would be forced to accept any document that comes from that state. This stems from the fact that many of these "Fraudclosure Loans" have been electronically signed and recorded through the "MERS" (Mortgage Electronic Registration System) system.

When it comes to loans, the banks don't mind using laws to come down hard on average citizens to kick them out of their houses instead of working with the people until they can get back on their feet. They don't mind displacing families. They enjoy packaging these loans as securities, leveraging them 10-fold and selling them around the globe. They enjoy the fees they earn every time they package these loans and resell them and the subsequent billions of dollars in bonuses accrued to top executives.

But when the law goes against them, then they want to retroactively change laws to serve whatever context they desire and their own personal interests. The law means nothing to these people and the Congress is complicit in all of this and may as well be the accomplice driving the car away from the bank, because they have helped these Financial Executives rob the Financial System and the American people. For the average person, we expect that throughout life sometimes we will win and sometimes we will lose. For the Banksters, they don't think they should ever lose and thanks to our corrupt government they probably never will.

Time to break the Banksters


2nd wave of the Banking Meltdown is here

How can the United States avoid Bankruptcy?


The Plunge Protection Team and the Ponzi Economy

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Time to break the Banksters

What Is MERS and What Role Does It Have in the Foreclosure Mess? (Hint: It Holds 60% of All Mortgages, But Has ZERO Employees) - (Washington Blog - October 13, 2010)

What is MERS? - Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems or "MERS" - It is the company created and owned by all of the big banks to process title to property in the U.S. Approximately 60% of the nation’s residential mortgages are recorded in the name of MERS.

Why was MERS created in the first place? In the mid-1990s mortgage bankers decided they did not want to pay recording fees for assigning mortgages anymore. This decision was driven by securitization—a process of pooling many mortgages into a trust and selling income from the trust to investors on Wall Street. Securitization, also sometimes called structured finance, usually required several successive mortgage assignments to different companies. To avoid paying county recording fees, mortgage bankers formed a plan to create one shell company that would pretend to own all the mortgages in the country—that way, the mortgage bankers would never have to record assignments since the same company would always “own” all the mortgages.


"At the Root of the Crisis We Find the Largest Financial Swindle in World History", Where "Counterfeit" Mortgages Were "Laundered" by the Banks - (Washingtons Blog - 10/12/2010)

The tidal wave of evidence showing that the giant banks have engaged in fraudulent foreclosure practices is so large that the attorneys general of up to 40 states are launching investigations.

People's homes are being taken when they didn't even hold a mortgage, and the big banks have been using "robo signers" to forge mortgage related documents. Indeed, even president Obama has been hit by robo signers (see this and this).

Its so blatant that foreclosure mills have published price lists for forging documents, including such gems as:
"Create Missing Intervening Assignment" $35
"Cure Defective Assignment" $12.95
"Recreate Entire Collateral File" $95

According to economist Max Wolff:
The securitization process worked by "packag(ing), sell(ing), repack(aging) and resell(ing) mortages making what was a small housing bubble, a gigantic (one) and making what became an American financial problem very much a global" one by selling mortgage bundles worldwide "without full disclosure of the lack of underlying assets or risks."

Buyers accepted them on good faith, failed in their due diligence, and rating agencies were negligent, even criminal, in overvaluing and endorsing junk assets that they knew were high-risk or toxic. "The whole process was corrupt at its core."

Indeed, there was fraud at every step of the mortgage process. The big banks intentionally signed up borrowers with insufficient income and assets, threw out the documentation because it would prove fraud, racked up loan fees and received short-term payments before all of the new borrowers ran out of money, and then laundered the bad loans into securitized instruments to sell to the suckers.

The banks created an intermediary called "MERS" to hold all of the documentation, in at attempt to shield the banks legally. But courts have held that this scheme doesn't fly, and that MERS doesn't have title to foreclose on houses. See this and this (and as Tyler Durden points out, MERS might have infected the commercial real estate market as well.)

Then there's the whole foreclosure scandal, where banks have forged and backdated documentation to try to prove they are entitled to foreclose. This is the part that is in the news right now. But because fraud was committed every step of the way - from mortgage origination and loan applications, to securitization, to MERS to foreclosures - it shows a fraudulent scheme, and not just sloppy paperwork.

The Hound's Take: Wall Street and the financial institutions in our country are who have gotten us into this mess that is an economic depression. We need to look back to the TARP fund and its passage by the Congress in the heat of the moment during the weeks following the wild rides of the stock market in the middle of September 2008.

What was done at that point in time has certainly not remedied the situation that we faced then and still face today. Please look at the Drudge Report where the top news of the day is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke looking forward to the Federal Reserve purchasing United States Treasury Securities. This will not fix anything. This is monetizing the debt (devaluing the currency). This has never been attempted in this country before and in every country where this has been attempted it has lead to hyperinflation. If this Genie is let out of the bottle, the possibilities of controlling the valuation of our currency will be at serious risk.

What we see today is a serious systemic crisis based upon corruption. We need to go back and correct the mistakes that were made two years ago. That would be the best thing to do. We gave a few individuals way too much power and they have not acted in the American peoples interest. They have acted only in Wall Street's interest. We should not continue down this path of uncertainty. We need to correct the mistakes that have been made.

Let's look at the value of homes. Honestly,if we were evaluating how much a homeowner can sell their house for it is substantially less than what it was a few years ago. What is holding up this redefinition of market values? I believe it is collusion between the financial institutions and the government as a coordinated action. Governments at all levels do not want to see housing values fall, because this will have an effect on tax revenues and banks do not want to lower the value of assets that they have on the books. They don't want to write down these values and don't want to put these toxic assets on the market and accept the losses and purge the system of these assets that were overvalued because of the bubble economy related to real estate.

The bottom line is that the banks are insolvent and the sooner that we come to that conclusion, the sooner we are going to be able to get out of this depression. We need to break up the banks and decentralize the power concentrated on Wall Street through Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo,and Citibank. We need to force these megabanks to be broken up much the same as AT&T was broken up back in the late 1970s.

Most of the actions above, which were unethical, were perpetrated in the name of consolidation, which ultimately led to corruption caused by greed. Greed may be good for those at top of the food chain, but what we have seen is people have their lives ruined so that these scavengers at the top of the financial food chain could get bigger and bigger just for the sake of getting bigger and bigger. These people are narcissistic sociopaths who care nothing about the security of this nation and its people. They are out of control and it is time to reign them in and rectify this situation and make the people of this great nation whole again. There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth, but when you do it through fraud and at the expense of innocent people, then it is wrong and you should be made to pay back these ill gotten gains. We know what the problems are and we need to fix them and we need the ensure that we never go back down this road again.

2nd wave of the Banking Meltdown is here


How can the United States avoid Bankruptcy?

Saturday, October 16, 2010

2nd wave of Banking Meltdown is here

MSNBC—Oct. 14, 2010—From the Dylan Ratigan Show. People are starting to fight back against mistreatment by mortgage lenders. And the extent of the housing mortgage mess is beginning to come to light.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Game, Set,...Match?

Death of a city - Gary, Indiana



Wall Street swimming in money while Main Street is swimming in Debt - The Sellout of America - Top 35 Financial Institutions will get $144 billion in bonuses - (Wall Street Journal - October 11, 2010)



Dollar fall sparks stability warnings
- (Financial Times - October 14, 2010)- Increasing expectations the Federal Reserve will pump more money into the US economy next month under a policy known as quantitative easing sent the dollar to new lows against the Chinese renminbi, Swiss franc and Australian dollar. It dropped to a 15-year low against the yen and an eight-month low against the euro.