Matt Weidner – Fighting For The American People

Posts Tagged ‘help for homeowners florida’

You think what’s happening with the subprime credit crash is bad?  Well, here we are years into it and we’re still not anywhere near the  end of this crash…..and despite years of tinkering and denial, have you heard any proposals that you think will solve the massive, systemic problems?

Sorry folks, there ain’t none.  Principle reductions won’t work anymore…you just cannot write down enough given the crashing market…and even if you did, the writedowns would only cause further price declines. Modifications?  Forget it.  Even if the servicers could process paperwork or get the modifications out by the sixth try, most just do not make economic sense anymore.  Short sales?  Sorry, not enough Canadians to buy them all and you can just forget about American purchasers….not nearly enough jobs to support the new households.

There’s that word again…Jobs….not Steve Jobs…Not McDonalds Jobs….Real jobs…Any Jobs. Sustained jobs.  You know, Careers, trades, occupations, salaries, benefits.   Those kinds of jobs are gone and the “leaders” are not doing anything to bring them back.  But forget about foreclosures, cause that problem is just the first debt crisis to hit.  The next crisis (and it ain’t going to wait in line for eternity for the current crisis to conclude) is the looming student loan debt crisis.

The same vipers and villians that sold Americans up the river and stole all their savings and equity engaged in an even more sinister scheme…stealing not just the existing equity of the American middle class…no, they took it one huge step further and stole all the life’s work of the young generation that had not yet made any money….they raped and pillaged the students who mortgaged all their future earnings while they were in college to pay for student loans.

But now that they’re out and cannot pay those loans, the Wall Street Vipers are going to descend and rip away and garnish their wages from Starbucks or McDonalds.

The whole thing is not unlike the Martin Luther and his dispute with the Catholic Church.  One of the major catalysts behind the Protestant Revolution was the selling of indulgences….it had been going on for years (the first bubble) but what really pushed Luther over the edge was the selling of indulgences for the those that had been dead for years (the second bubble).

It’s bad enough that the wages and equity of the middle class have been gutted, stolen….but just what’s going to happen in this country when the very young and disaffected realize they’ve all been robbed and they have ZERO future because they’re future has been securitized, collateralized, brokered, bought and sold.

Just add this disaffected student class of in with the homeowners, the middle class, my friends in the military, the municipal workers and every other American who has been robbed blind while the vipers on Wall Street just have an Orgy of Greed and Obscene profits.

Can’t imagine the impact of this mix?  Don’t have the imagination?  Just have a look over at Greece…..

http://seekingalpha.com/article/277941-shorting-student-loans-the-next-major-credit-bubble

Student Loan Debt

Look back at how long I’ve been screaming about “Capacity“.  CAPACITY, CAPACITY, CAPACITY.  No one has any idea who many of the entities are that brought suits to foreclose over the last several years, especially when they were plaintiffs of the alphabet soup variation, “the XSIS 2206- Alt Trust”.  What is that?  Where is that? Who is that?  Those are all questions judges should have been asking for years…especially before they granted that alphabet soup zombie trust the right to throw their neighbor out into the street.  Instead, the oft repeated judicial phrase was, “You haven’t paid your mortgage so I’m granting Summary Judgment.”  Far worse in my mind than a homeowner not paying a $1,000/month mortgage is a judge granting a $200,000 judgment to a zombie alphabet soup plaintiff.  Who owns those homes that you granted foreclosure to now your honor?  Who was that judgment assigned to after the fact?  Who or what took title to that property?  Why did no one care to think about all of this?

We screamed CAPACITY!  We screamed STANDING!  We screamed FRAUD!

Like Alice in Wonderland or the Twilight Zone, some judges claimed they couldn’t see anything.  Now it turns out that in many cases not only did they not have CAPACITY, not only did they not have STANDING, not only were the committing FRAUD.  They also had NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH.

The minions of this profound evil will turn this around on the judges that I hold such profound respect for.  They will shrug their shoulders and say, “We were just the proponents of our client’s case, it was the judge’s job to review the files and make sure we were not committing fraud.”  What about that retired couple that got thrown out into the street two years ago but their home still stands vacant?  What about that latino couple with a poor grasp of the language and our legal system, the husband defeated and destroyed because he could not keep the home he had bought for his family?  The single mom that did her best but just couldn’t keep her head above water?

All of them defeated by zombie trusts and a legal system too concerned with doing the bidding of the banks and institutions that were bailed out with our money.  The question is not how bad all this is or how deep it will go.  That sinking, sickening pit in all of our stomachs answers those questions. The real question is how will we work to make it right to all those people that were wronged?

We must all start with the perspective that our economy, our neighborhoods, our homeowner’s and condo associations are far better off with homeowners in those homes.  We must understand there is a powerful American ethic that homeowners want to pay a mortgage, they want to be bought into the system.  I’ve done hundreds of homeowner refinances and purchases.  When a homeowner signs those documents, there is fear, but there is pride.  Pride that I have a mortgage.  A sense of purpose that now I’m going to work and pay this mortgage for this home I own.  That was all tossed out the window in this brief flicker of time that was the securitization frenzy.

It’s now time to provide homeowners with a track to stay in their homes and support their communities.  We put our realtors, our appraisers, our contractors, our people back to work in our communities.  We collect mortgage payments from homeowners who are in these homes then we wait for the Wall Street Fat Cats to come on down and prove up their claim to the money and the mortgages that our elected circuit court judges are supervising.  The process is self-funding.  The infastructure and administrative capacity are already in place through the existing mediation programs that are up and running in circuits across the state.  The funding is in place once our courts turn away from the unfairness of the $9.6 million rocket dockets and focus on Stability for Florida Families.  The program is detailed below:

Florida Statute 69.021.

One of the most rewarding things about this epic battle that is the foreclosure fight is meeting homeowners and other advocates who are standing up and fighting for themselves and fighting for the heart and soul of our courthouses.

Our courts, our judges, our way of life is being transformed right before our eyes as real people are going into our courthouses and fighting for their homes and their own families.   If we do make it out of this profound economic crisis…and unfortunately that is very much uncertain at this point in time…our courts and our legal system will be better off.  It may be a bit of a difficult transition at first as courts have to cope with accommodating consumers, but from what I’ve seen our courts and our judges are adapting.

In some ways I’ll bet many of the judges appreciate seeing real people in their courtrooms.  For decades judges have slaved away, largely in obscurity with only other lawyers to interact with.  Now, they see real people and hear their stories first hand, not filtered through their lawyers.  Given the impossible task and pressures they are under, I think our judges are largely handling this crisis very well.  Keep supporting those who are out their doing their jobs and let’s all keep working to help every judge understand that the equities in these cases largely favor that homeowner standing in front of them.  Read below a comment made by a reader, because it really makes an important point we all should keep in mind….

Unbeknownst to many people, we have only seen the tip of the mortgage crisis.   The scariest part currently of this crisis is that people are losing hope.   They are becoming indifferent to losing their homes and are losing their pride in living the American dream.   The common consensus is “why bother…the bank doesn’t care…why should I?   I will just go rent.”  The American dream has gone from aspiring to own your own home to just hoping to keep your home.

Finally, please watch this video which features my friend and one of my heroes Lisa Epstein and the ForeclosureHamlet website.  It’s encouraging when the press is reporting the foreclosure story from the consumer point of view.  Stories like this one and the other recent article in Mother Jones are helping to shift the public discussion about foreclosures into a much more sophisticated discussion that considers both the root causes of this crisis and the potential long term consequences.

Make sure to watch the video here and KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT!

Congratulations to Ice Legal for really being on the front lines of the fight to ensure basic rights and the rules of the courts are respected and thanks to Mike Dillon for the early morning heads up on the story.

Now the national media is picking up on what all of us have known for far too long…..the rich foreclosure barons are shoveling in millions of dollars and abusing courts and homeowners in the process.

One of my questions is how courts can continue to sanction the conduct reported in this article?  How can our federally-backed lenders and servicers continue to sanction such conduct?  It’s a terrifying commentary on what our country has become when the conduct reported in this article has become so institutionalized that it’s widely accepted.  We should all be reminded that this fight we’re in is a fight for the very heart and soul of this country and our courts.  There are judges that “get it”.  (Note that one of Pinellas County’s great judges Hon. Anthony Rondolino is quoted prominently in the article.)  There is a small but growing band of activists that are sounding the alarm bells.

Let’s just hope this evil fire gets extinguished before we reach a point of catastrophic no return….if we have not already.

Read on.  Visit the Mother Jones website for the full story.

— Illustration: Lou Beach

How the federal housing agencies—and some of the biggest bailed-out banks—are helping shady lawyers make millions by pushing families out of their homes.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

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.”

This all might seem like a legal technicality, but it’s not. The faster a foreclosure moves, the more difficult it is for a homeowner to fight it—even if the case was filed in error. In March, upon discovering that Stern’s firm had fudged an assignment of mortgage in another case, a judge in central Florida’s Pasco County dismissed the case with prejudice—an unusually harsh ruling that means it can never again be refiled. “The execution date and notarial date,” she wrote in a blunt ruling, “were fraudulently backdated, in a purposeful, intentional effort to mislead the defendant and this court.”

More often than not in uncontested cases, missing or problematic documents simply go overlooked. In Florida, where foreclosure cases must go before a judge (some states handle them as a bureaucratic matter), dwindling budgets and soaring caseloads have overwhelmed local courts. Last year, the foreclosure dockets of Lee County in southwest Florida became so clogged that the court initiated rapid-fire hearings lasting less than 20 seconds per case—”the rocket docket,” attorneys called it. In Broward County, the epicenter of America’s housing bust, the courthouse recently began holding foreclosure hearings in a hallway, a scene that local attorneys call the “new Broward Zoo.” “The judges are so swamped with this stuff that they just don’t pay attention,” says Margery Golant, a veteran Florida foreclosure defense lawyer. “They just rubber-stamp them.”

But the Ices had uncovered what looked like a pattern, so Tom booked a deposition with Stern’s top deputy, Cheryl Samons, and confronted her with the backdated documents—including two from cases her firm had filed against Ice Legal’s clients. Samons, whose counsel was present, insisted that the filings were just a mistake. She refused to elaborate, so the Ices moved to depose the notaries and other Stern employees whose names were on the evidence. On the eve of those depositions, however, the firm dropped foreclosure proceedings against the Ices’ clients.

It was a bittersweet victory: The Ices had won their cases, but Stern’s practices remained under wraps. “This was done to cover up fraud,” Tom fumes. “It was done precisely so they could try to hit a reset button and keep us from getting the real goods.”

Backdated documents, according to a chorus of foreclosure experts, are typical of the sort of shenanigans practiced by a breed of law firms known as “foreclosure mills.” While far less scrutinized than subprime lenders or Wall Street banks, these firms undermine efforts by government and the mortgage industry to put struggling homeowners back on track at a time of record foreclosures. (There were 2.8 million foreclosures in 2009, and 3.8 million are projected for this year.) The mills think “they can just change things and make it up to get to the end result they want, because there’s no one holding them accountable,” says Prentiss Cox, a foreclosure expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. “We’ve got these people with incentives to go ahead with foreclosures and flood the real estate market.”

Stern’s is hardly the only outfit to attract criticism, but his story is a useful window into the multibillion-dollar “default services” industry, which includes both law firms like Stern’s and contract companies that handle paper-pushing tasks for other big foreclosure lawyers. Over the past decade and a half, Stern has built up one of the industry’s most powerful operations—a global machine with offices in Florida, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—squeezing profits from every step in the foreclosure process. Among his loyal clients, who’ve sent him hundreds of thousands of cases, are some of the nation’s biggest (and, thanks to American taxpayers, most handsomely bailed out) banks—including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. “A lot of these mills are doing the same kinds of things,” says Linda Fisher, a professor and mortgage-fraud expert at Seton Hall University’s law school. But, she added, “I’ve heard some pretty bad stories about Stern from people in Florida.”

While the mortgage fiasco has so far cost American homeowners an estimated $7 trillion in lost equity, it has made Stern (no relation to NBA commissioner David J. Stern) fabulously rich. His $15 million, 16,000-square-foot mansion occupies a corner lot in a private island community on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. It is featured on a water-taxi tour of the area’s grandest estates, along with the abodes of Jay Leno and billionaire Blockbuster founder Wayne Huizenga, as well as the former residence of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. (Last year, Stern snapped up his next-door neighbor’s property for $8 million and tore down the house to make way for a tennis court.) Docked outside is Misunderstood, Stern’s 130-foot, jet-propelled Mangusta yacht—a $20 million-plus replacement for his previous 108-foot Mangusta. He also owns four Ferraris, four Porsches, two Mercedes-Benzes, and a Bugatti—a high-end Italian brand with models costing north of $1 million a pop.

Despite his immense wealth and ability to affect the lives of ordinary people, Stern operates out of the public eye. His law firm has no website, he is rarely mentioned in the mainstream business press, and neither he nor several of his top employees responded to repeated interview requests for this story. Stern’s personal attorney, Jeffrey Tew, also declined to comment. But scores of interviews and thousands of pages of legal and financial filings, internal emails, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones provided insight into his operation. So did eight of Stern’s former employees—attorneys, paralegals, and other staffers who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. (Most still work in related fields and fear that speaking publicly about their ex-boss could harm their careers.)

For the rest of the article, click here.