Perhaps you’ve seen this incredible video, which I saw for the first time today:
In it, a police officer actually says these words (0;42) :
“Obama has decimated the friggin’ Constitution. So I don’t give a damn–if he doesn’t follow the Constitution, we don’t have to…”
Incredible-but only if you haven’t been paying attention to the police state that America has become. But as the saying goes, the fish rots from the head down, and something sure is rotten here in the state of…well, the United States.
The courts are no better at following even their own law, i.e., precedent. A stunning example of that in the real estate context, as we wrote about here over a year ago and is representative of the type of decisions still being churned out every day:
“I feel like this needs to be pointed out after reading the opinion of District Judge Sam Sparks in the Texas case of Kramer v. FNMA (i.e., Fannie Mae). Sparks argued that MERS is allowed to assign a Deed of Trust separate from a note and disparages the Plaintiff’s (i.e., Kramer) reliance on the Carpenter v. Longandecision of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1872. Carpenter says that assigning only a mortgage/deed of trust is “a nullity.” Sparks says that statement is merely dicta and not precedent and therefore, he doesn’t have to heed it and besides, Texas law says assignment of only deeds of trust is A-OK. Except that Sparks ignores all the other Texas case law which says exactly the same thing as Carpenter, a lot of which can be found in the brief of David Rogers in the appeal of Kramer v. FNMA, which brief can be found on PACER.”
The next few years are going to be very interesting, indeed…
“But the fact is that one conservative American billionaire and a handful of American judges have just pushed Argentina, a nation of 43 million people with an economy bigger than that of the Netherlands or South Africa, into defaulting on its debt. It’s a move that threatens not only chaos for the Argentinian people, but potential chaos for other countries hoping to borrow money in the future.
“This is America throwing a bomb into the global economic system,” Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz told The New York Times on Thursday in a front-page story about the battle.”
Destroying a whole country over fake money
Doesn’t really matter if the guy is conservative, liberal, white, black, or anything else. What matters is that with the cooperation of the judiciary of the United States, one rich man is being allowed to jeopardize the future of an entire country. And why? Because years ago he bought some of Argentina’s debt for pennies on the dollar— which, like all such debt/money, was created out of thin air—and wants the debt paid in full plus interest.
This kind of BS is the logical conclusion of fake, fiat, out-of-thin-air money—the kind that doesn’t exist, and is admitted to be created out of nothing. That logical conclusion? One man can throw an entire country into chaos. That’s not the kind of world I want to live in, which is why I have embarked on the admittedly quixotic mission of trying, in my own small way, to get people to see that, as one article here on LRM puts it: “THE SOLUTION: SINCE THE MONEY ISN’T REAL, THE DEBT ISN’T EITHER”. From that article:
“And this is what I was trying to get at in my earlier post, titled ‘Bank Says: If You Believe Banks Lend Deposits, You Are Wrong.’We have been purposely misled about money creation. We have been purposely trained to think that banks lend deposits and/or the bank’s own, pre-existing money and that therefore we have a duty and–their favorite word–an “obligation” to pay it back. It is this mistaken belief that has caused the financial crisis and this belief that threatens to drag the United States, if not the entire world, into financial ruin.”
And indeed, that is what is happening here—quite literally, the world is heading into financial ruin through the Paul Singer/US courts mantra of “everyone must always pay their debts.” That an “obligation” to “pay back” money that never existed in the first place trumps every other consideration. To that, I say no. I reject that entirely. There is a higher obligation—to decency, to freedom, to people over profit instead of the other way around.
Good for Argentina for refusing to pay someone who didn’t loan them money and bought the fake “debt” for pennies on the dollar.
Or perhaps that headline should read: STOP ROOTING FOR THE OVERDOG AND START CHEERING FOR THE UNDERDOG!
Sympathizing with the powerful over the weak is probably the single greatest mind control trick ever played on the public at large. In the past week, I have received a number of Facebook comments on various posts about Israel-Palestine which actually advocate killing all Palestinians. As Brand explains in the video—and is commonly known and undisputed–the Palestinians are clearly the weaker party in this situation. Yet somehow it has gotten in the minds of some of my Facebook friends that the more powerful a party is, the more sympathy they deserve.
And that is ultimately the point of the Hannity segment which Brand dissects above: have sympathy for the powerful, and screw the weak. The horrible trick of this cruel mindset is that no one who says they want all Palestinians killed thinks that they sympathize with the powerful over the weak. Instead, they think of themselves as sympathizing with the good guys over the bad guys–equating “good” with “powerful” and “bad” with “weak”–precisely because the powerful make themselves out to be the “good guys” and make the weak out to be “the bad guys,” regardless of the actual moral issues in play.
Malcolm X put this very astutely:
“The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (13 December 1964)
This attitude pervades society in different permutations
To put this horrible attitude of sympathy for the powerful instead of the weak another way: the rich deserve sympathy, the poor deserve scorn. Many people feel this way unconsciously, or perhaps subconsciously–they don’t realize they’re favoring the rich and powerful over the poor and weak, even whenthey themselvesare part of the poor and weak. It’s insanity, and it leads to people hanging on for dear life financially speaking ill of those who have already fallen off the financial cliff, as in: “If those deadbeats had just paid their bills, they wouldn’t have lost their house.”
It’s a classic divide-and-conquer gambit and as noted by Malcolm X in the above quote, it is inculcated by the media, which is of course owned by the rich and the powerful and so therefore the media portrays its owners in the favorable light in which those owners would like to be seen. And the pervasiveness of the media (which is never any further away than your pocket or your purse) and that subtle, favorable light blinds many people to the reality of even their own plight, keeping them from acting in solidarity with those who share that plight, whatever that happens to be. Indeed, not only is solidarity prevented, but it turns people of the same plight/class/social stratum virulently against each other.
And that is exactly the point of this–to keep us from challenging the rich and the powerful by sowing in-fighting. Puts one in mind of the Bob Marley tune “Top Ranking”:
“They don’t want us to unite:
All they want us to do is keep on fussing and fighting.
They don’t want to see us live together;
All they want us to do is keep on killing one another.”
Obviously this has been going on since time immemorial, but isn’t about time we recognized this tactic for the joke it is and snap out of our conditioning?When did it start to become acceptable or the norm to stop rooting for the underdog and start bowing down to the overdog?
As the saying goes, “things will go on until they can’t.” So let’s create an environment where this divide and conquer craziness can’t continue.
To answer the question in the headline–money exists as much as anything else that is completely made up out of nothing…
Indeed, check out the above video from Time Magazine’s website. What Time’s Justin Fox tells us at approximately 1:47 is not and never has been a secret: the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air. He even calls it “magic” and says that the Fed has a “magic checkbook.” After reminding us lowly viewers that we can’t possibly have access to that magic checkbook, the cloying narrator tells us to think of the Fed chair as a “financial Gandalf.” Here’s a transcription of the passage:
Fox: “[The Fed] can create dollars out of thin air.
Narrator: Money out of thin air? Sounds like magic to me.
Fox: OK, that’s magic. They do it in this really simple way, it’s just down at the New York Fed, which is this big building down on Wall Street. There are a bunch of people who call up banks and say, “Hey, I wanna buy some bonds from you.” And when the Fed buys say, $20 million worth of debt securities, they basically have this magic checkbook. The Fed just suddenly says, “OK, we’re sending you $20 million.” Those dollars suddenly show up in the bank’s books.
But those dollars weren’t anywhere before, it wasn’t like the Fed actually had this stash of dollars in its checking account.
Narrator: Annnnd that magic checkbook? Don’t try this at home. Only the Fed gets the magic checkbook. Think of the chair as a financial Gandalf.
Fox: That is the great, mystical power we bestow upon the Federal Reserve System.
Oh brother…
I realize this video is going on 5 years old, but I had never seen it until recently. I already knew all of this information and have written about it in these pages before (see for example, “The Solution: Since The Money Isn’t Real, The Debt Isn’t Either“), but something about this really struck me for some reason while watching Fox’s explanation, and that “something” is this: money does not exist. It’s not that I haven’t thought that before or said it a million times and written about it before. I’m not sure why Fox’s explanation made me think it again, but it did.
Because when you really think about it, since the money is created out of thin air, that necessarily means it doesn’t exist. The Fed can no more say that the $20 million in Fox’s above example exists in any sort of objective reality any more than you or I could say that we have, I don’t know, super powers or something, because in objective reality, we do not.
The truth hurts
In other words, money is fictional. Imaginary. Think about that for a minute, particularly if it sounds wrong or nonsensical to you. Let it sink in. Try not to let what you’ve been told your entire life about money get in the way of understanding this very simple concept.
I know you don’t want to believe it. You can’t believe it. After all, if it were true, that would mean…all the hard work…all the long hours…for something imaginary? And that would mean all the hounding of the debt collectors and the shame and the guilt and the worry and the sleeplessness and the suicide or thoughts of it…were for something imaginary?
The truth hurts. But it is still the truth. And once we understand this truth, we face more difficult, painful questions, i.e., why should we let this continue? How best to get out of this false reality?
So why would I say money doesn’t exist? Because like Gandalf, it’s fictional. Most people will say, “But I can buy things with the money the Fed creates.” True, but that doesn’t make the money any less fictional, it just means that other people are participating in the massive fiction.
Look, everyone agrees that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, right? Of course they do. However, every Christmas, Santa is everywhere. You can sit on his lap, tug at his beard, tell him what you want for Christmas. He seems quite real!
But unfortunately, Santa is still fictional–he doesn’t exist. And like money, there is mass participation in the fiction of Santa Claus, but that does not and cannot make Santa Claus exist. In the same way, mass participation in the fiction of money does not and cannot make money actually exist.
Above is another, more recent video–from 2013–that again I hadn’t seen until recently (brought to my attention by KathyJo Torrenga). In fact, one of the hosts actually says what I’m saying here: the money for one’s mortgage (or anything else) doesn’t exist (at approximately 0:26)! Indeed, it’s the only rational conclusion one can come to once one really lets this information sink in! Though the video is produced for a New Zealand audience, the material in it is true of every country in the world.
In the short video, we meet an older couple who have realized the scam that bank “lending” is, and the absurdity of the situation is played out over a Monopoly game board and an iPad. We also meet a former banker from London who suggests that the government, not private banks, should create the money supply.
The only problem with the government creating the money? The government creating the money! Indeed, since the dollar has been a pure fiat currency (i.e., backed by nothing and created out of thin air) since 1971, the cat has been let out of the bag that you can actually run a society on…nothingness.It has now been proven that society can run on imaginary “money” that has no inherent value, that is given value only by our faith in it, and is in fact created by we the people. So why should anyone but we the people create the money? It doesn’t really exist anyway, but we know that people do appreciate a token, a feeling that they have not been taken advantage of. That is where the self-issued currency I have written about before comes in:
“I propose that government/central bank-issued money be replaced with self-issued currency. That is, each individual person can issue as much currency as he or she needs to buy whatever he or she wants. And he or she would also have to accept the self-issued currency of others. Sounds crazy, I know, but it’s not. At all. I’ll give you a couple reasons it’s not:
1) Money is already self-issued…
2)Money is already worthless.”
And let’s face it, there’s going to have to be some kind of change in the financial system sooner rather than later. Might as well go into this inevitable change with an idea of something that benefits all people, instead of a small handful.
Let me close with a passage from an earlier post mentioned above–“The Solution”:
“…since the money isn’t real, then the debt isn’t either. Indeed, If we all would accept the truth that the money that was “loaned” to us for houses, cars, educations, etc. was not in fact a loan at all but instead was a purposeful hoax–a trick played on us to get us to spend our lives in a perpetual state of anxiety, panic, and labor that benefits the corporation/state instead of ourselves–we could easily allow all of this “debt” to be forgiven/repudiated immediately and start over from scratch with a new and better system. Indeed, that’s the real story of the Bank of England’s press release about money creation: they are telling us in no uncertain terms that we’ve been had and that we were purposely misled.”
“A group of activists from Standing Against Foreclosure and Eviction (SAFE) sat outside Mayor Ed Murray’s office for four hours today, asking that he intervene to prevent the eviction of veteran and his wife from their West Seattle home, until the mayor and his chief of staff came out and met with them this afternoon.
According to SAFE organizer Josh Farris, Murray told them “the SPD is not coming” to evict Byron and Jean Barton, and that he’d let the activists know if anything changes.
As I reported on Friday, SAFE—joined by members of Socialist Alternative, including state house candidate Jess Spear—surrounded the Bartons’ West Seattle bungalow when King County Sheriff deputies arrived that morning to enforce an eviction order, following the foreclosure and sale of their house. The deputies attempted to evict the couple by loading Byron, who uses a wheelchair to get around, into an ambulance.
Supporters of the Bartons lay down in the way of the ambulance, preventing it from leaving, and the authorities eventually gave up. It’s now fallen to Seattle police to enforce trespassing laws.
But activists demanded that they hold off, and the mayor has agreed. “He’s has asked SPD not to act until we’ve explored all options,” confirms mayoral spokesperson Megan Coppersmith. “That means essentially standing by while the latest court proceedings unwind.” (The Bartons are currently challenging the legality of their foreclosure in court.)”
Once again, we see what happens when we fight–sometimes we actually win, even if only for a short time. If the Bartons and SAFE had given up–had complied with the eviction and stood down–the Bartons would be homeless. Instead, the opposite is true, so kudos to the Bartons and SAFE and to Mayor Murray. Now let’s work on keeping the Bartons in their home permanently!
“BARTON FAMILY EVICTION BLOCKADE, DAY 5 – JULY 21, 2014 — 6548 41st AVE. SW, SEATTLE
PRESS CONFERENCE, 8:30 A.M. – JULY 21, 2014 — MAYOR ED MURRAY’S OFFICE, SEATTLE CITY HALL, 7TH FLOOR, 600 4TH AVENUE, SEATTLE
We are in 5th day of the Bartons’ Eviction Blockade. Please join at the Barton Home, 6548 41st Ave SW, Seattle. Donations of food and bottled water are greatly appreciated.
In addition, on Monday, July 20 at 8:30am, SAFE will hold a press conference at Mayor Ed Murray’s Office, 7th Floor, Seattle City Hall, 600 4th Ave, Seattle, WA. SAFE is requesting that Mayor Murray postpone any police action regarding the home of Byron and Jean Barton until the civil land dispute between the Bartons and Triangle Properties, LLC, which bought their home at a foreclosure auction, is resolved in the state courts. The Bartons are currently appealing the legality of the sale of their home by Chase Bank to Triangle Properties.”
Chase Bank? Aren’t they criminals?
Chase Bank, as most readers will know, is a criminal organization that last year reached a record settlement with the US government over admitted representations Chase made regarding mortgages and the “mortgage-backed” securities they were supposedly bundled into:
“As part of the settlement, JP Morgan acknowledged it made serious misrepresentations to the public – including to investors – about numerous transactions relating to residential mortgage-backed securities. The deals collapsed in 2008 when the housing market plunged and the scale of the risks was exposed, and the resulting financial tumult led to the biggest crisis since the Great Depression…
‘Without a doubt, the conduct uncovered in this investigation helped sow the seeds of the mortgage meltdown,’ said Holder. ‘JP Morgan was not the only financial institution during this period to knowingly bundle toxic loans and sell them to unsuspecting investors, but that is no excuse for the firm’s behavior.‘”
And now we are supposed to believe that this admittedly criminal organization has the legal right to take a Vietnam vet’s house? Give me a break.
Again, from the SAFE press release, giving more background on the Barton family:
The Barton house has been in the family for 61 years. Byron grew up in the house, and the couple inherited it after Byron’s mother passed away from Alzheimer’s disease. Due to financial difficulties resulting from Byron’s mother’s illness, the Bartons were forced to mortgage their house, but were given a predatory sub-prime loan. Realizing that their interest rate was rapidly increasing, the Bartons began reviewing their mortgage paperwork only to realize that their lender, Washington Mutual Bank (WaMu), had forged several signatures on the mortgage paperwork, greatly exaggerating the Bartons’ annual income in order to sell them a loan the family could not afford. JP Morgan Chase Bank acquired the mortgage after buying WaMu shortly after it was placed into federal receivership in 2008. Chase Bank proceeded to foreclose on the property despite the fact that the loan allowing them to foreclose was illegal, and the Bartons were challenging the loan in court. After the foreclosure, on April 11, 2014, Chase Bank sold the Batons’ house to Triangle Properties, LLC. Triangle Properties has continually tried to evict the Bartons since they bought the property from Chase Bank.
Byron Barton is a Vietnam Veteran who ran a remodeling company with Jean until 2012, when he had a stroke that left him paralyzed on the left side of his body with an atrophying hand and a severe speech impediment. Since the stroke, Byron has lived in a hospital bed, and can only be transported by wheelchair. In addition to carrying for her husband, Jean Barton works at Mary’s Place, a day center for homeless women and children. The Bartons have no place to go that can accommodate Byron’s medical needs, as well as their two children, who also help care for their father.
The Barton Family is just one victim of a systemic system of predatory lending run by the banks and enabled by the courts. SAFE works with victims of this system to help them defend themselves and their communities against financial abuse and violation of their fundamental human right to housing.”
And the last, inspiring part:
“Byron, Jean, and SAFE have vowed to continue fighting until their family’s rightful home ownership is restored. Please join us in helping the Bartons save their home!”
We should all vow to continue to fight until the foreclosure fraud has ended and all victims of it have been made whole. All power to the people and the Bartons in particular!
Unfortunately this is what it’s come to. The banks and their judicial henchmen are reaping what they have sown–lawlessness. Not to say that I think this family is breaking the law. I’m quite sure the opposite is true. But this is how you stand up–stop complying. They can’t throw you out if you won’t leave!
“3:33 PM: We went by about an hour ago (en route to something else) and nobody was out on the street – two TV vehicles in evidence, though. One commenter says KIRO is reporting the family got back into the house. We asked KCSO spokesperson Sgt. DB Gatesif they plan to go back. Not at the moment, she said, and offered more background, since KCSO is the enforcement agency for evictions anywhere in King County. According to Sgt. Gates, since an earlier incident in which a detective declined to serve the eviction papers, they have met with the Bartons multiple times and warned them that what happened today was going to happen – but the Bartons decided to stay anyway .”
If ten bucks could help take down the bank you despise the most, would you pay it?
In order to do just that, a family in Washington state has started a crowdfunding campaign over at Kickstarter called “Beating Bank of America.” Love the optimism contained in that headline, and when you talk about defeating BoA, well–you’re totally speaking my language. They want to raise $5,000 by August 14 to help with attorney fees, with a minimum donation of $10.
Here are some details from the site:
“4 years ago, after a year of fighting the bank, on my husband and I’s anniversary our home was foreclosed on. We admit we made mistakes, unfortunately, the biggest was believing the advice the Bank representative gave us. When we applied we were not behind yet, but we knew my husband was getting laid off and that I was ill with what became just the first of many illnesses. They told us that they would not help us until we were 3 months behind, but that then we definitely qualified once we made that mark.
What really happened is that we allowed 3 months to go by only to be told that they would no longer accept payments from us and that foreclosure preceding had started. They consistantly ‘Lost’ our paperwork, and the hours I spent on the phone with them were never noted, we were told we never called or sent in the thousands of papers we had. We didn’t give up, we refused to. So through the pain of pancreatitas and a bad Gall bladder I fought with everything I had. No way was I letting the surgery hold me down. We took the little money we had and invested in the first law firm that specializes is getting Loan modifications. We once again re-submitted every piece of information we had, time and time again because they played the same games on them they did with us of ‘Lost paperwork’ etc. On June 3rd of 2010 they once again denied our loan mod. The catch? We have emails to our lawyers FROM THE BANK that they denied us using our old paperwork, and not the current. They took our home on information that they knew was not accurate. They sold our home the next day, and the very same bank that sold our home illegally BOUGHT our home.”
I don’t want to come across as advertising for Jamie Vos and her family. I don’t know them personally, and I can’t vouch for them at all (but I feel like I know them since their story is soooo familiar). I do not receive a dime from promoting this campaign, nor do I want to.
What I do want to see, however, is Bank of America taken to task. And Wells Fargo. And Chase. And so on.
How the banks will lose—the peaceful revolution
But of course, the economy is in the toilet. People don’t have money to fight these banks. And that’s what the banks are counting on: that we will cower—broke, ashamed, and isolated—and not challenge them.
Ah, but that’s the beauty of a campaign like this–most people could contribute $10 and not even miss it. Get 500 people to do that, and suddenly the bank now has another headache to deal with, another fire to put out. Suddenly their little plan of keeping us isolated and unable to challenge them is, you know, completely spoiled. Ruined. And I love that.
Indeed a campaign like this is a way we could all help each other with the one thing we have the least of and the one thing the banks have an unlimited, free supply of: money. And it gives fuel to the thing we have an unlimited supply of and which they have none of: the fighting spirit of righteous anger.
This type of campaign is something that definitely should be encouraged and replicated. This campaign only has one backer right now, but let’s change that. Let’s take down these criminal banks, $10 at a time!
So we sit here day in, day out, wondering why the law isn’t being followed–why the foreclosure machine continues to steamroll over the populace. We wonder why homeowners aren’t winning their cases against the big banks, despite clear and compelling evidence of fraud and malfeasance.
Well, wonder no more, as two successive attorneys general in Utah (“Shurtleff” was the AG from ’01-’13, “Swallow” was campaigning in ’12 and was “elected” in ’13) were arrested yesterday on charges of bribery, among other things. How does that play into homeowner issues? Check this out:
“In 2012, the attorney general’s office intervened in a lawsuit against a Bank of America subsidiary on behalf of thousands of Utah residents facing foreclosure. The Salt Lake City-area couple that brought the suit then spent $28,000 holding a campaign fundraising party for Swallow. The couple’s individual case was settled favorably, but Shurtleff in December directed the attorney general’s office drop the state case, despite objections from staff attorneys.”
That’s pretty foul, right? Of course it is. And the “Bank of America subsidiary” referred to above is Recontrust. Check out that story here.
But wait–it gets worse:
“Prosecutors said a division chief in the Utah attorney general’s office reported Swallow indicated to Bank of America that Utah would drop the case if the couple’s case was settled favorably.“
Unbelievable. Yet totally believable.
So if you spend $28,000 to help the attorney general get elected, he will intervene on your behalf but everyone else who didn’t spend $28,000 on his campaign? Thrown to the wolves. And by wolves, I mean Bank of America.
And if all that weren’t bad enough, here’s the final insult:
“Shurtleff later accepted a position with a Washington, D.C., law firm that represented Bank of America.“
How do you like them rotten apples? It is precisely this sort of corruption that people are talking about when they say that the U.S. is now a banana republic. And from the most unlikely of places, in my view–Utah, the world headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
To be clear, the behavior of Shurtleff and Swallow does nothing to besmirch the LDS faith. It’s just that, in my experience, no LDS person would even consider engaging in the same behavior as Shurtleff and Swallow. The Mormons I know personally are beyond reproach. That’s why I personally find it so shocking that everything is rigged, even in Utah.
As we have written about many times here at LRM, endorsements on promissory notes are a big deal, to put it lightly (see list of articles at the end of this post). The judges know this. The banks know this. MERS knows this. The attorneys for both homeowners and banks know this.
Given this state of affairs, it is very curious then that when banks and/or servicers come to foreclosure court, they often show the court notes which are not endorsed. The fact that unendorsed notes are used by the banks usually in fact disproves the assertion they’re trying to make, i.e., that some trust or other is entitled to take someone’s house. Unendorsed notes disprove this because it is just like endorsing a personal check to someone else–if I’m party B trying to cash a check that is payable to party A and party A hasn’t endorsed it to me (or to blank), the bank won’t honor it. Same way with promissory notes.
So if I’m Fannie Mae and I’m trying to foreclose because I say I now own a promissory note that was originally payable to Countrywide and is not endorsed, I ought to be SOL–i.e., not allowed to foreclose–because there’s no endorsement and hence no negotiation per UCC 3 (and more than likely the lack of endorsement is also a violation of the PSA/trust indenture). And this is not conjecture or something that happens in only a minority of cases–it happened to me, it happened to people I have talked with. In the words of Violent Femmes “they [the banks] do it all time!”
So to cure this lack of endorsement in a court case if you or me or our attorney makes too big of a deal about it, at some point–usually late in the litigation–an endorsement will suddenly appear as if out of nowhere! Magic! Ta-da! Deus ex machina!
And in a lot of (the vast majority) cases, judges will just say, “OK–good enough, works for me!” Then you’re on the street. Or that has been the case for a number of years now.
Judges tiring of ta-da endorsements?
However, in an article today, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism writes that maybe such chicanery is becoming less and less acceptable:
“Now it is admittedly late in the game, but more and more courts are taking a dim view of clearly inadequate documents. We’ve embedded a gratifying, short appellate court decision that reverses a lower court ruling in favor of a trustee, US Bank. Here, the amusing but depressingly common issue was not only did US Bank submit new documents (in this case, the usual “ta dah” allonge) but they didn’t do it correctly, as in the doctored documents were undated and thus failed to establish that US Bank had the right to foreclose when it started foreclosure proceedings against the borrowers, the LaFrances. Of course, it might well be that faking the documents correctly would clearly be a fraud on the court, and it would likely be possible to establish that via forensics. In other words, the foreclosure attorneys may have been incompetent, or they may have been willing to go only so far in how much sanctions risk they were willing to take.”
God, I hope so. The fact that it’s less acceptable now won’t undo the wrongful foreclosures of the past, and as Smith points out later in the article, this ruling she links to doesn’t mean the homeowners won or even that they will win:
“Now this ruling does not mean the LaFrances win, since the case has been sent back to lower court. But US Bank has painted itself in a real corner by twice having presented documents that failed to establish its right to foreclose. If they try submitting new ‘originals’ again, that would almost certainly open the case up for appeal, and this appeals court seems to be on to bank tricks.”
But it’s a start. Maybe.
I have a feeling that US Bank still has some tricks up its sleeve, not least of which is throwing itself on the mercy of the court. But we’ll see. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end, because once the ta-da endorsements can no longer get past the judiciary’s bullshit detector, there isn’t much else the banks can argue at that point.
Here are the links to past articles on this topic:
IMPORTANT NOTE/DISCLAIMER: The above article is not legal advice and was not written by an attorney. It is merely a collection of common-sense, rational observations written by a sane, rational layperson with common sense. It is recommended that you consult with an attorney for any and all legal advice and/or action.
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