News Alert! Lameduck Congress may try to quietly pass a retroactive mortgage fraud immunity bill!

Better Believe It

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sun Nov-14-10 01:23 PM
Original message

News Alert! Lameduck Congress may try to quietly pass a retroactive mortgage fraud immunity bill!

Edited on Sun Nov-14-10 01:34 PM by Better Believe It

Is this lameduck congress preparing to quietly pass legislation, perhaps as a bill attachment, to retroactively legalize mortgage fraud?
Maybe. Reports are surfacing on the internet indicating this may happen and shouldn't be automatically dismissed. This sort of thing happens! So stay alert and not be caught off guard! DU'ers who work on 'the Hill" or have friends with access to all legislation that may come up for a vote should be on the lookout for any buried mortgage fraud attachments to bills. Check out these news reports. And if you have any further information on this please post it. BBI

Get Ready for the Great MERS Whitewash Bill
By: John Carney
Senior Editor, CNBC.com
November 12, 2010

When Congress comes back into session next week, it may consider measures intended to bolster the legal status of a controversial bank owned electronic mortgage registration system that contains three out of every five mortgages in the country.

The system is known as MERS, the acronym for a private company called Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems. Set up by banks in the 1997, MERS is a system for tracking ownership of home loans as they move from mortgage originator through the financial pipeline to the trusts set up when mortgage securities are sold.

Now it appears that Congress may attempt to prevent any MERS meltdown from occurring. MERS is owned by all the biggest banks, and they certainly do not want it to be sunk by huge fines. Investors in mortgage-backed securities also do not want to see the value of their bonds sink because of doubts about the ownership of the underlying mortgages.

So it looks like the stage may be set for Congress to pass a bill that would limit MERS exposure on the recording fee issue and perhaps retroactively legitimate mortgage transfers conducted through MERS private database.

Self-styled consumer advocate Neil Garfield says the legislation is already being drafted:

After years of negative judicial decisions about the use of a straw-man on mortgages, MERS was about to lose its existence as well as its credibility. But now all of that is set to change as Wall Street money is pouring into the coffers of those who are receptive (i.e., almost everyone in Congress). The legislation is already being drafted under the interstate commerce clause to ratify MERS and everything it did retroactively. It appears that the Obama administration is ready to pardon all the securitization deviants by signing this bill into law. This information is corroborated by several people who are in sensitive positions � persons who would be the first to know such proposals. Fortunately, there are some people in Washington who have a conscience and do not want to see this happen.

http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/pardon-livinglies-obtains-wall-street-playbook-mers-to-be-legitimized-by-act-of-congress/

http://www.cnbc.com/id/40150186

-------------------------------------------

Kangaroo Courts and Retroactive Legality
by RON BEASLEY
November 13, 2010

What if you robbed a bank and got caught? You then used some of your ill gotten gains to buy enough lawmakers and they passed a law to make your crime legal. That�s exactly what the banks themselves are doing in an attempt to save their hides from mortgage/foreclosure fraud.

As Michael W. Hudson explained in The Monster many if not most of the subprime mortgages were themselves fraudulant to begin with and then when those loans were securitized the paper work itself was so sloppy that there is no clear title path. The purpose of the �rocket dockets� is to ignore all that fraud and bail out the very same banksters and finacial terrorists that brought the world to the edge of financial collapse. Over at Zero Hedge Tyler Durden has some robo signer confessions that should be enough to put banksters in prison.

But the biggest fraud may be MERS itself and John Carney at CNBC reports that the lame duck congress and the Obama administration are about to retroactively legalize all that fraud.

So is it still called bank robbery when it�s the banks with the help of lawmakers who are doing the robbing?

http://themoderatevoice.com/92343/kangaroo-courts-and-retroactive-legality/

--------------------------------------------

PARDON! LIVINGLIES OBTAINS WALL STREET PLAYBOOK: MERS TO BE LEGITIMIZED BY ACT OF CONGRESS
by Neil Garfield
November 11, 2010

Besides the obvious seediness of this maneuver, it runs roughshod over state property laws, and the rights of investors, homeowners and borrowers. It amounts to a permanent installation of a Federal system that supersedes the county records for recording property rights. Off-record comments I�ve heard from people in power are outraged at this assault on states� rights. But these people are not legislators, who are getting promises larger than anything in your imagination, if they will support such a bill. It might be couched as a uniform law to be adopted by the states to get around the states rights issues, but it will permanently remove some of the power over property that lies solely within the jurisdiction of the states and place it preemptively within federal jurisdiction.

All of this is scheduled to happen during the lame duck session of congress between now and the end of the this year, 2010. That means in a manner of days, some bill that may look like it has nothing to do with property, mortgages or foreclosures is going to have attached to it a provision whose effect will go even further than the notarization bill that went through Congress like S�t through a goose and almost got signed by the President. We caught that one AFTER it was passed by Congress unanimously but before Obama signed it.

We announced it as an attempt at a presidential pardon to all those who committed crimes in the notarization of documents that were fabricated and forged, all those who committed forgery and perjury and all those who created counterfeit documentation that was presented to courts as original documents.

This time we got the information, we think, before it was stitched into some innocuous looking bill. If we don�t find it and block it, the plight of homeowners will get that much worse.

http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/pardon-livinglies-obtains-wall-street-playbook-mers-to-be-legitimized-by-act-of-congress/

--------------------------------------------

A Bill to Indemnify MERS Retroactively?
by we are stardust
November 13, 2010

We know what rewards the banks can offer to Congresspeople to pass laws like this; we know the excuses which they use to justify voting for things like this. Ack! The costs to the banking system would be catastrophic! If we don�t paper over these frauds, or we let the penalties for the end-runs around state law mortgage filings occur, it will cause further meltdown!

Watchers warn that the bill will likely sound benign, and simply assert some federal ascendancy over state law, if I get the drift. Many who understand the foreclosure fraud best have indicated that contract law and property rights are dead as we knew them, and that for college graduates for years to come, The Law will be the most lucrative field to pursue.

This subject is obviously outside my wheelhouse, so I welcome your takes and opinions. But it seems that if this effort is already in the works, it tells us that Bank Balance Sheets are more important to our government that People are, and that not once of will be exempt from the disasters this will cause, even to our individual property taxes.

Surely there is someone in the federal government who will champion the Rule of Law, the states, the counties, and the People. All I can think is that we search online for more information, and contact every member we can and make clear our objections to this rumored perfidy�and soon. Lame Duck starts on Nov. 15.

http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/bill-indemnify-mers-retroactively-7478