Hey Occupy you wanna convert your movement into something that will really matter? Let me show you how to convert the movement into something real and tangible…
As people think a bit more critically about what it means to ” occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think through what Occupy Wall Street might do next, I would humbly suggest they check out the activism model of Project: No One Leaves. It exists in many places, especially in Massachusetts “” check out this Springfield version of it “” and grows out of activism pioneered by City Life Vida Urbana. It is similar to activism done by the group New Bottom Line and other foreclosure fighters. Here is PBS NewsHour‘s coverage of the movement.
The major goal of Project: No One Leaves is to mobilize as many resources as possible to protect those going through foreclosure and keep them in their homes as long as possible in order to give them maximum bargaining power against the banks. For those focused on ” weapons of the weak,” this moment “” with banks and creditors using state power to conduct massive amounts of foreclosures, thus impoverishing poor neighborhoods through a financialized rationality “” is a crucial opportunity for resistance.
And more importantly:
What about going after past fraudulent foreclosures
when there is fraud upon the court?
[edit] Exclusions[edit] Fraud upon the courtIn the United States, when an officer of the court is found to have fraudulently presented facts to court so that the court is impaired in the impartial performance of its legal task, the act, known as “fraud upon the court”, is a crime deemed so severe and fundamentally opposed to the operation of justice that it is not subject to any statute of limitation.
Officers of the court include: Lawyers, Judges, Referees, and those appointed; Guardian Ad Litem, Parenting Time Expeditors, Mediators, Rule 114 Neutrals, Evaluators, Administrators, special appointees, and any others whose influence are part of the judicial mechanism.
“Fraud upon the court” has been defined by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to “embrace that species of fraud which does, or attempts to, defile the court itself, or is a fraud perpetrated by officers of the court so that the judicial machinery can not perform in the usual manner its impartial task of adjudging cases that are presented for adjudication”. Kenner v. C.I.R., 387 F.3d 689 (1968); 7 Moore’s Federal Practice, 2d ed., p. 512, ¶ 60.23
In Bullock v. United States, 763 F.2d 1115, 1121 (10th Cir. 1985), the court stated “Fraud upon the court is fraud which is directed to the judicial machinery itself and is not fraud between the parties or fraudulent documents, false statements or perjury. … It is where the court or a member is corrupted or influenced or influence is attempted or where the judge has not performed his judicial function — thus where the impartial functions of the court have been directly corrupted.”