Matt Weidner – Fighting For The American People

Posts Tagged ‘subprime lenders’

As 2010 skids to a close, we’re all wondering just what do we have in store for 2011.  Well, that’s really an open question in my mind.  I can envision some dramatic and radical scenarios that start to turn things around, but I’m not very hopeful, primarily because of the bumbling disasters of 2010.

We’re dug into a real deep hole here…and just in case you’re not real clear and need help remembering..let’s take a little recap of the issues that bombed us out in 2010:

1. The Subprime Lenders, Banks and Foreclosure Mills Have Caused Chaos in Our Courtrooms- This is an overarching fact that cannot be ignored.  Under this heading are a whole range of problems and costs that are ultimately being borne by all taxpayers.  What is most frustrating is that precious little attention is paid to the fact that most of these problems originated with failed businesses that are no longer around to fix the problems they’ve caused.  It’s as if a car company built millions of vehicles then sent them out onto the roads.  Now the brakes are failing, the accelerators are sticking and they’re causing the roads and highways to be violent and dangerous for everyone….but regulators, lawmakers and judges are just allowing these failed cars to continue plying our roadways.  It really is staggering to think that the wrongdoers who caused all this mess have suffered no consequences while we all slog away here in the trenches trying to sort out their chaos…no arrests, no real investigations, no consequences for flawed, fraudulent and in some cases criminal activities that cost us all billions.  The proper course off action would have been to gut the lenders and prosecute the criminals that caused this mess back in 2008, similar to the way this was handled in the S & L crisis in the 80′s.  We failed to do this so the problems caused by these lenders and the entire failed industry continue to spew across this once great country like vomit from a frat boy with alcohol poisoning.  Our county is poisoned by toxic debt and we can’t get better until we are purged of this poison.  Time to come face to face with this reality.  Time to force the banks to suffer the crushing losses that are hiding right there in plain sight on the balance sheets.  There is no way around it and the comeuppance will not be pretty.

2. The Banks, Their Agents and Law Firms Are Lawless- In the face of this crisis, the banks and all their agents have thrown the law and the rule books out the window.  In most cases they know their conduct is wrong or questionable or illegal, but they’re making conscious decisions to plow ahead without following the rules….and why should they? There has been precious little consequence for not playing by the rules.  The best example of this situation is the failure of the foreclosure mills in Florida to follow the rules of the Florida Supreme Court that mandated all complaints be verified as of February 2011.  There was a vast period of time when tens of thousands of these complaints were not filed in compliance with the rule and to this day most are not correctly verified, but this is just ignored across the state.  Just one example, but the most blatant.  The foreclosure mills are not law firms, as Mother Jones noted in the groundbreaking article, “Fannie/Freddie’s Foreclosure Barons“, these are very questionable enterprises that deserve intense scrutiny and investigation.  I hope that they will be rooted out, closed and the work they were doing farmed out to say….Florida’s regional legal aid offices?  I’ve got so many problems with these foreclosure mills, but a big question I have is how much law is actually being practiced in these places?  Our whole judicial system is predicated on lawyers signing and taking responsibility for the documents filed in court but as this system is collapsing we see that it’s impossible to know who signed many of these documents and even if they were signed by an attorney how much of the work was performed by slave wager earners in foreign countries?  I’ve got a bad enough problem with bad lawyers doing bad work, but I’m really, really incensed by the thought of some sweatshop worker turning out the work that throws an American onto the street…especially when that slave was being paid with that homeowner’s tax dollars.  Don’t show me Bar opinions that justify off shoring legal work, if there’s one job that should stay here under some kind of American supervision, it’s legal work.

3. What We Still Don’t Know About Robo Signing- The robo signing scandal is another example of an entire industry gone wild with disastrous national consequences.  But just think about this for a moment.  Even after all the national attention the robo signing controversy got we still have no idea exactly what the robo signer controversy was.  We all think the affidavits were merely not notarized properly or that there was a problem with personal knowledge, but is there any deposition or formal investigation to confirm this?  Absurd pleadings are filed in courtrooms all across this state and probably the country seeking to “Withdraw Affidavits” and “Ratify Nun Pro Tunc” Final Judgments. This situation is totally without precedent in our country’s entire judicial history and yet it continues to move forward unabated.  Foreclosure sales and auctions are still occurring based on the assumptions, but we have no facts at all on the fraud or the misdeeds.  How in God’s name can judges continue to move forward in any of these cases, especially when they’ve been alerted to fraud on the court, without further inquiry. I mean, how do we know that there isn’t something far more nefarious afoot, such as the situation of a dead woman executing tens of thousands of affidavits that was just reported today in the Wall Street Journal.

4. The Banks Will Kick Down Your Door Whenever They Want to- Across this country there are teams of jack booted thugs driving around in pick up trucks with lists of properties on them.  If your property is on their list, they may just decide to kick down your door.  If they want to they may seize your property.  They will change the locks on your door.  They have no court authority, they have no right to do this, but they will do it anyway.  Think you’re safe just because you’re not in foreclosure?  Think again….I have clients from all over the state who are not even in foreclosure but this is happening to.  Think law enforcement will help you?  Think again….the biggest fight initially is getting law enforcement to even respond to these calls, much less even take a report and forget about getting them to actually charge any crimes.  Their budgets are tight and law enforcement is totally tone deaf to this issue.  I’ve got cases where the thugs came back again and again, taunting and harassing my clients and my clients called law enforcement over and over, but they refused to do anything at all…saying this kind of harassment and breaking in was not their job…now think about it…if you cannot count on law enforcement to keep you safe from these thugs….who can you count on?

5. The Economy Is Only Getting Worse- Our international economic model is broken and America is suffering badly. The value added middle class jobs we need to pay the debts and living expenses necessary for basic survival have been shipped offshore.  The middle class engine that once drove the Locomotive Called The American Economy is gutted, gone, broken, destroyed.  America’s business, legal and elected kleptocrats sold out the American middle class to the highest bidder and they have no plan to make this right.  Think about it…do you hear anything coming out of any of our centers of power that give you any hope that we’re making this better?  Where are the ideas and leadership that will put millions of Americans back to work?  Where are the real plans to trim spending and refocus our priorities?  I spend hours every day reading and watching, hoping and praying, but I find nothing that give me any hope….and the scary thing is that it will take years to implement solutions once they have been proposed and worked out….and I hear nothing to suggest solutions are on the horizon…very scary indeed.  And to my friends who point to the poppycock numbers coming out of New York and Washington DC, I say…first, you’re foolishly naive if you believe those numbers and next, even if there’s any truth to them, selling out America’s key industries, resources and assets to foreign interests for a short term boost in the bottom line is hardly a legitimate formula for long term success.

6. Government and Industry Responses to The Fraudclosure Crisis Have Been Disastrous- I remembered starting of 2010 thinking that we would be heading in the right direction.  I counseled my clients to fill out their paperwork and negotiate with their lenders.  I networked with realtors because I expected a vibrant and robust short sale market.  But none of this happened.  Instead our government spewed billions of dollars directly to the criminal lenders, their servicers and agents.  Borrowers spent millions of hours in time and money filling out forms, standing in line and playing their modification and short sale games.  What do we have to show for it?  Almost nothing.  Talk to any realtor, purchaser or seller.  Reasonable short sales that should have closed rotted and died.  Homeowners that could have been paying modifications and wanted to pay were denied for every reason and for no reason at all.  Each state is careening in different directions in the middle of this tempest, but no state seems to be taking a more absurd direction than Floriduh.  While other states like New Jersey and Ohio are now slamming the brakes on Fraudclosuregate, Floriduh’s Legislature, in it’s infinite wisdom dolled out $9.6 million dollars and gave the Fraudclosure Mills a license to go full steam ahead…the result?  The mess has been greatly exacerbated, basic rights trampled on and a perpetuation of a failed system.

7. Foreclosures Are Not Good For The Economy-There are no reliable numbers out there, but there are tens of thousands of homes across this country that the banks have foreclosed on then just left abandoned.  Even more cases are filed when it just doesn’t make rational economic sense to do so.  As long as you’ve got a homeowner who’s willing to make a mortgage payment, we’d all be far better off letting that homeowner stay in the home with a modification than allowing the banks to foreclose….but that’s not what we do.  All across this country homeowners are rejected any kind of help which sends the home careening into the black hole of foreclosure….to what end?  Even if the mill gets their judgment promptly will they net more in the near or long term than they would by throwing the homeowner out  into the street?  The answer is probably no….especially while our economy continues to drag.  And yet foreclosures continue…some smart people still trumpet the absurd company line that, “We gotta get these foreclosures done so we can get this economy moving again.”  This attitude ignores basic economics…forget about the equity of it.   Finally, a great deal of attention has been paid recently in Florida to the amount of foreclosure cases that are backlogged in courts, but no one has yet to examine why these cases have been abandoned.  So few cases are defended at all, so that’s not the reason and few homeowners get modifications so that’s not the reason.  I believe in many cases, the chain of ownership and custody of documents is so collapsed that the mills just can’t figure how to get it moving again….so why did they file it in the first place?

8. Process Servers- This subset of this whole enterprise gets it’s own special place here.  I’m just dying for someone to tally up just how much I’ve personally paid to serve summonses on the ubiquitous Unknown Tenants.  500,000 foreclosure cases in Florida by 2011 times 4 unknown tenants in each case, then stretch that back for however long this has been going on.  And if these costs are passed on through the REO sale to lender/plaintiff, i.e. Fannie/Freddie then that means I’m paying those costs…what do you think I think about that?  And now let’s turn to the bad or faulty service.  Just how much of it is out there?  Too early to tell, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m betting that this is going to be explosive.  How much diligent searching and inquiry were done?  Again who knows, but I’m guessing we’ve got real problems here.

9. Wall Street Records its Fourth Most Profitable Year Yet- There’s  really not anything else to say here.  Just soak it in and think about it.  How is America doing in the middle of all of this?  Remember, these obscene profits were booked courtesy not of any innovative new business, but based on the great largess of you the America people.  It’s an obscene outrage on such a grand scale.  I can’t stand the thought of one taxpayer being thrown onto the street by any company that’s lapped up lots of goodies from the trough that was laid out before them by Congress and the policy players that have assisted these institutions in the looting and pillaging of the American promise, but the fact of the matter is that all of them have.  This will never be made right while that gross disparity exists.

10. The Press and The People- For much of 2010, most of the reporting focused on the homeowners and their inability or unwillingness to pay mortgages.  During the latter part of this year, we’ve seen a very dramatic shift in the reporting with more and more serious news organizations reporting on the much larger and far troubling issues swirling around the cesspool that is foreclosures.  Sure people should be paying their mortgages, but let’s talk about the real economic factors that got this country into this very bad place and the state and federal policies that are making it much worse.  How did our leadership let all these bad mortgages get written in the first place? What are the perverse incentives roiling around inside the evil banking and lending institutions that have been consolidated and are now drunk with the kind of power that only immunity and impunity can bring?  Our press now has their teeth firmly dug into these issues and so long as the First Amendment survives, we may all learn the gross and sickening details about about all of these issues.  That is perhaps my biggest lesson for all of 2010, the value of press and primacy of the First Amendment.  When this is all said and done, we’ll all take a good hard look at our press and the First Amendment.  I predict a renaissance for press and reporting in general…and oh, yeah…I think we’re going to find fraud and incompetence and corruption and stupidity on a scale and magnitude that this country has never, ever seen before.

So what exactly will 2011 have in store for all of us?  Well, that’s for tomorrow.  I of course have a few thoughts that I’ll drop on here for all of you to dig into and read.  Until then Happy New Year!

Why won’t my lender work with me?

Why would the bank sell my home to someone else but won’t cut me the same deal?

Why do all the banks lose mortgage modification paperwork over and over?

Why are the banks allowed to make record profits while Americans suffer like never before?

Why have none of the subprime lenders ever been punished?

Why has no executive ever been arrested?

Why have US taxpayers pumped billions of dollars into these lenders and seen little or no relief?

Why does it feel like the deck is stacked against the homeowner in foreclosure courtrooms?

Why can’t someone tell us exactly what the perverse incentives are against working with the current homeowner?

Why are more homeowners not actively defending their cases?

Why are judges not punishing attorneys for grossly abusing court rules and procedures?

Why are lenders pushing for foreclosures when they can’t sell the ones they have?

We all know that most, if not all, of the subprime lenders that were originating the loans we are now defending for homeowners were engaging in various degrees of widespread fraud and deceit in order to close the loans.  Our borrower clients were not sophisticated enough to catch the fraud or participate in it, but every level of the originating lenders were.  Take the attached lawsuit against filed by a mortgage insurance company against Countrywide Home Loans for instance, in it,

They admit we didn’t actually review the loans we were insuring, we trusted Countrywide and relied on our “delegated” model for reviewing. (That means we didn’t look at all at the loans, we just issued an insurance policy.) The astonishing this is that there were billions of dollars sloshing around between originating the loans with shady brokers here on the ground level to when they were packaged, insured and sold to trustee, then investors and no one was actually looking at the loans themselves. I was a broker, we made loans and we would never do a loan unless we actually looked at everything, credit, income, visit the home.

The subprime mess was caused because no one, and I mean no one was looking at anything and they were all lying to one another…every player at every step in the process. And they needed unsophisticated players like our clients to start the chain of lies that started when the loans were originated then went all the way to the White House.

There is so much pushback from the remaining servicers and lenders who are fighting and preventing even reasonable modifications from occurring.  One fascinating thing that befuddles me is the fact that if the laws on fraud and improper inducement were really followed here that might provide us with real opportunities to use proven allegations of fraud to force the hands in these modifications.

Read the lawsuit and let’s use the swarm strategies to pull all these pieces together.

countrywidelawsuit

At some point in time, I’m going to sit down and write the full story on the tragedy that is the Foreclosure Wars.  The press is doing an excellent job of pulling the pieces together, but there are so many details and important facts that are being missed.  When I write the book, it’s going to start like this:

The collapse of the American economy didn’t begin in the First Great Financial Collapse in 2008, or in the Second Great Collapse that’s coming in 2011, it began in 2004 when New Century Mortgage extended a loan on a home in a rough section of town in St. Petersburg, Florida to a couple who had no chance of ever repaying it…and no real incentive to repay it.

I had a front row seat to this collapse when I was hired to foreclose on the second mortgage my client had placed on the home.  My client was the typical American entrepreneur.  He worked eight hours a day at his full time job, then he’d spend another 8 hours building by hand, often by himself, a series of homes in this troubled part of town.  As he neared completion of his one off, solidly built American dreams, he would stick a sign in the yard and in a few days the home would be under contract to a family ready to claim their piece of the American dream with no money down, no real ability to pay for the home and no chance of ever climbing out from under the massive mortgage debt they would sign up for.

In this particular case, New Century Mortgage gave the borrowers a $150,000 mortgage and my client gave a $25,000 second mortgage, a figure that represented the entire profit my builder client hoped to make after breaking his back for six months. This was just a few years before the subprimes would loan any amount of money to anyone.  At this point in time, no lender was willing to pony up the full $175,000 that would have allowed my client to immediately take his profit off the top.  My client’s only hope to take his profit was the hope was some other lender would come along in a few months to offer the hopeless homeowners a bigger loan and pay him off in full.  The new homeowners moved in to their brand new, shining example of The American Dream and all was well….for a few short months.  It didn’t take long before payments were late and the homeowners were in default. (Remember they had no hope of ever making the income they would need to support this home in even the short run.)  First came the foreclosure lawsuit filed by something that claimed it actually owned the $150,000 first mortgage, Deutshe Bank Trust, filed by one of Florida’s now infamous Foreclosure Mills.  Next came the foreclosure lawsuit I filed on behalf of my client, seeking to recover the $25,000 he claimed he was due on the second mortgage.

A most interesting thing happened when the foreclosure mill called into the judge’s chambers to try and foreclose the First Mortgage.  I was at the hearing on behalf of my client the second mortgage holder and I raised some objection to the Affidavit that was submitted by the foreclosure mill. The judge agreed that my objection was valid and then a most curious exchange occurred.  The Foreclosure Mill replied over the speaker phone, “that’s no problem judge, I can just correct the Affidavit and have it faxed right over to you.”  The judge and I both questioned how this were possible when the lender was a corporation based in California. “Well”, the Foreclosure Mill Replied, “That’s because we actually produce and sign the affidavits right here in the law office”

BOMBSHELL–The hearing and exchange described above occurred in 2006, long before Jeffrey Stephan and the robo signer controversy of 2010.  So here we were in a hearing and the attorneys on one side of the case admitted that they were producing and entering the evidence they needed to win their case.  This would seem to be a clear cut and blatant violation of all rule of evidence and ethics, but it was apparently a widespread practice….when the judge raised objections to the fact that attorneys were entering evidence, the Foreclosure Mill helpfully replied, “It’s not a problem for us to file these affidavits, we do it all over the state.”  Hmmmmm…. “We do it all over the state.”

If we looked back at all the foreclosure cases that have been “won” by the banks since 2006, my mind struggles to comprehend how many of these cases should not have been “won” by the banks at all if a) we all realized the long tern consequences of allowing such flawed and faulty procedures to occur and; b) we had all been paying closer attention to the manipulations of the foreclosure mills, the subprime lenders and the Wall Street Fat Cats that caused all this mess.

Subprime Loans Were Never Intended To Be Repaid

A key fact, and one that people (understandably) have a hard time wrapping their heads around, is the fact that this family never had any hope of repaying this loan.  The vast majority of subprime loans were never going to be repaid, even if the US economy kept chugging right along.  So what company in their right mind would ever write a $150.000 check when they knew there was no hope of repaying that loan and what other incentives were at play in the orgy to write billions in dollars in loans that were not going to be repaid….that’s where the real (phantom) money comes in.

Just a small sampling of the serious title issues that will be raised in years to come and will result in challenges to tens of thousands of foreclosure judgments across this county and which will expose the title insurance underwriters to an unimaginable volume of title claims….I can only imagine that federal intervention will be required….read on.

Perform Complete Title Search $15.95 + TPC

A title search is the very first step in performing a foreclosure.  If your title search is not done properly, no matter what happens later, you’re going to have problems….real problems.  I have been a title agent for years and I can tell you that there is no way on God’s green earth that I would go anywhere near performing a title search on even the smallest property without being paid an amount of money that would allow me to do the job correctly.  A proper examination of title, in the simplest and easiest case, would take anywhere from a half an hour to an hour.  Anything beyond the most basic title search would require quite literally hours of examination, hard work and study.

Cure Defective Mortgage $12.95 + TPC

“Defects” come in all different varieties…was the legal description incorrect?  Was the marital status or name incorrect?  Were pages not recorded or no recorded correctly?  Whatever the case, “curing” these errors takes time and can be very difficult.  There is just no way this reflects the real cost of doing this critical work and who actually has the right to correct a mortgage if the error was made by the original mortgagee years prior who is probably long gone out of business?  I very much question whether a subsequent mortgagee has the legal authority or right to correct errors made so long ago without Order of the court.

And now we get to the real damming elements from this list.  Take a careful look at each of the items on this list because these critical pieces of paper are where so many of the problems exist with the foreclosure cases that have been churned through over the last several years and it is these documents that will provide the fertile ground for challenging titles and judgments for years to come.  The list suggests that LPS is creating these documents….we also know that LPS or their employees were executing these documents.  The real question is whether those executing these documents had even the slightest authority or legal capacity to execute these key documents.  Any old person can sign documents all day long, but if the person signing the documents lacks the specific corporate authority or prerequisite legal basis to sign the documents, then they HAVE NO LEGAL FORCE OR EFFECT.

Understand that the documents listed below are the key and core documents that courts have relied upon to grant tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of foreclosure judgments across the country.  We will be carefully examining these documents over the years to come.  The examination will focus on whether the person who signed these documents had any authority whatsoever to sign the documents.  Some questions.  If an originating lender has been in bankruptcy or has been a dissolved corporation since 2006/2007, how could LPS (or any other document mill) get documents signed on behalf of that defunct corporation?  Done properly, a federal bankruptcy trustee will authorize agents to sign on behalf of bankrupt corporations and supervise their actions, but how many bankruptcy trustees authorized the robo signers to sign for all these bankrupt  subprime lenders who make up the bulk of the mortgagees in these cases?

And here’s a good one…..under the Uniform Commercial Code, the technical legal requirement for an allonge is that it must be “so permanently affixed to a note so as to become a part of that document”…..earlier comments to to the Code made it clear that an allonge was only to be used when an endorsement could not be stamped on the note itself….but here is the billion dollar question…..

What business does LPS or any document mill have in producing allonges when those should only be in custody/control of the entity that is in possession of the original “wet ink” promissory note?

Create Lost Note Affidavit $12.95 + SH
Create Note Allonge $12.95 + SH

Create Missing Intervening Assignment $35.00 + TPC
Record Prepared Assignments $12.95 + TPC
Cure Defective Assignment $12.95 + TPC

LPS-DOCX Price List

Read carefully the Motion to Dismiss that I filed in one of my cases, drafted by a brilliant lawyer who works with me, Michael Fuino.  I submit that this memo was the first and most comprehensive document which addresses the issues surrounding Allonges.  Read the detailed legal history and research that we conducted.

allongemtd

(I also believe that Fuino’s memo and motions challenging affidavits was the first and most authoritative legal research on the affidavit issues that broke with Jeffrey Stephan, but that will be the subject of another post.)

One of the many problems those who are fighting foreclosures have to deal with is the fact that some judges and most people on the “outside” of the mortgage meltdown don’t understand that the Fat Cats set the mortgages up to fail from the very beginning–because mortgages that were “bad” paid the Fat Cats much more at the outset.  Now this is wild and insane stuff….how can mortgages given to people that have no hope of ever paying them (even if the economy didn’t crash)?  The answer lies in the lies, greed, fraud and arrogance that dominated Wall Street when these loans were created–a culture that continues to victimize normal Americans today.

If you really want to go insane watch this CBS News report here which details how Goldman Sachs was making millions of dollars by selling “shitty” deals to their institutional investors.  It just makes me furious to hear these guys gloating over making millions while at the same time refusing to admit to even the slightest amount of wrongdoing. The homeowners really were on the lowest end of the “dupes” totem pole, but they were not the only ones taken.

The book Chain of Blame details the unholy alliances that were formed between the subprime lenders and Wall Street and how the subprime lenders and Wall Street kept competing with one another to create “shittier” and “shitter” deals.  The bottom line is in order to keep making more insane profits, the bad actors had to keep making loans that were increasingly less likely to be paid in the long term because loans that performed would not provide the bigger payouts that came from the bets they made on the back end that the portfolio of loans would fail.

The national media is starting to pick up on this.  The quotes below are from a story in today’s St. Petersburg Times.

A central part of Lehman’s business was making and selling “liar’s loans” under its Aurora subsidiary. It was a suicidal enterprise. These kinds of loans, where borrowers have an incentive to inflate income or assets, are set up to fail. Black estimates that every dollar lent on a liar’s loan loses 50 to 85 cents.

In the short term, making these loans produces significant apparent but fictional income — and correspondingly huge bonuses for executives. Only later do the loans create real catastrophic losses for those holding them.

Lehman was the world leader in originating these loans. In the first six months of 2007, Aurora was lending more than $3 billion a month of subprime and liar’s loans. This guaranteed senior management extraordinary paydays. Even as the fall was becoming evident, the firm’s CEO and chairman, Richard Fuld, was awarded $40 million in total compensation for 2007. (Much of it in stock that later became worthless.)

Undoubtedly, the firm’s top executives knew that making fraudulent loans was its primary source of income. But Lehman assiduously attempted to hide that fact, classifying its liar’s loans as “prime” loans in disclosures, Black says. Had Lehman disclosed the true nature of the loans it was selling, no one would buy them and the firm would have been found out as insolvent.

To various degrees this kind of deceit was the business model of every player in the subprime mortgage lending and securities market: every bank that loaned money without documenting a borrower’s credit worthiness, every firm that securitized loans without examining the lender’s loan files, every accounting and law firm that helped fudge disclosures, and every credit rating agency that rated a mortgage-related security as safe without sampling the underlying loans.

So what’s all this got to do with the little ‘ole homeowner sitting in foreclosure today? 

One of the most important things we’ve all got to understand, and a key point we’ve got to make sure our judges start to understand, is that the very same lies, fraud, greed and unethical conduct that is now being exposed on such a massive scale in Wall Street and in Washington has migrated into our courtrooms.

Many judges and attorneys still cling to a naive and antiquated professional worldview wherein attorneys, as officers of the court, remembered that they are officers of the court and do not make false statements or engage in misleading practices before the court.  The problem is the entire foreclosure system is now functioning based on fabricated documents, forged documents, false and misleading statements and gross violations of the most basic ethical standards.  Two documents that are part of nearly every foreclosure file illustrate this point.

1)The affidavits of amounts due and owing that are filed in nearly every case do not meet the most basic evidentiary standards and they cannot be relied upon as evidence to grant foreclosure.

2)The assignments of mortgages or endorsements that are filed in nearly every case are either outright improper on their face (such as when the assignment post-dates filing of the suit) or questionable such as endorsements that “appear” on documents from failed or defunct subprime lenders that ceased functioning years ago.

Advocates and judges have only recently become aware of just how failed this whole system is.  Some judges are just covering their eyes, holding their noses and continuing to grant foreclosures despite the growing body of evidence that the law firms and the clients they represent are engaged in such widespread and systemic improper practices.  This will all come back to haunt every American for decades to come. The biggest problem is this represents a fundamental breakdown in the rule of law.  Courtrooms and judges are no longer owed respect and honor and fear…the pressures placed on our courts have turned them into fast food flop houses operating in servitude to the Millionaire Foreclosure Mills.  The only real objective is to plow through these hundreds of thousands of foreclosures as quickly as possible so that the foreclosure mills and their clients can continue to make millions.

Ignore long established rules of evidence

Ignore new rules of the Supreme Court of Florida

Ignore blatant and not so blatant fraud

Ignore expectations of professionalism and respect for judges and the courts by Millionaire Foreclosure Mills that have decided their profits are more important than treating the courts with respect.

There is one thing missing from this whole calculus and that is the fact that these practices and procedures are producing failed titles to property.  In the rush to plow through all these foreclosures, we’re creating a nightmarish scene of destruction where title to real property will be thrown into chaos for decades to come.  Some judges get it (do a google search for New York Judge Schack) and many, many more will get it in the decades to come when we title lawyers come back before them to vacate judgments of foreclosure that were improperly granted.  That’s enough for this morning, but obviously much more of this to come.