All across Florida foreclosure filings are on the rise. A recent article regarding Lee County, on the west coast of Florida which includes the city of Fort Myers, illustrates this point. The Clerk of the Court there, the infamous Charlie Green, known from his disparaging remarks against “deadbeat” homeowners, stated that filings are about double this year as compared to last year. For more on the article, read here.
In a recent study, according to AARP:
• About 600,000 people who are 50 years or older are in foreclosure.
• About 625,000 in the same age group are at least three months behind on their mortgages.
This week there were two pressing stories of note. One pertained to comments by David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Reagan administration, who has been extremely vocal and critical of our unsustainable spending and national debt. In the video, which you can see here, he states we are heading towards an even greater recession, chaos and paralysis. The other story is in regard to the LIBOR scandal in which bankers openly and with blatant disregard for the law manipulated key interest rates which cost pensioners and investors countless sums of money. A short video regarding this latest criminal act involving most of the major financial institutions and whether any banker will ever truly be held accountable is here.
In a recent letter by the Illinois Bankers Associations (IBA) to its state supreme court, the association makes it clear that it understands the issue asserted by lawyers such as myself “that many if not most mortgage notes which conform to the fixed requirements of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not negotiable instruments because they contain undertakings and conditions that disqualify them from the definition of “negotiable” in Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Similar arguments are being made with reference to mortgages recorded under the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS), which eliminated certain traditional paperwork when assigning notes and mortgages. According to these arguments, when plaintiffs are holding such notes (and/or when MERS is the mortgagee of record, depending on the state), these parties are precluded as a matter of law from asserting that they are holders in due course of the note (or that they have a beneficial interest in the mortgage). And, the arguments go, when a party cannot provide documentary evidence of a chain of title leading from the originating lender to that party (and likewise as to a transfer of the beneficial interest in the mortgage to that party, if applicable) – which parties frequently cannot do given the liquid nature of how assignments are made in the secondary market – the foreclosure lawsuit must be dismissed as a matter of law.”
The letter goes on to underscore how critical this is as “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together hold over $5.3 trillion in home mortgages, nearly half the entire residential mortgage market in the United States. Viewed on a prospective basis, Fannie and Freddie presently are issuing more than 95% of all mortgage-backed securities in the country.”
It’s the old argument of the ends justify the means. The banks ultimately believe they should be able to foreclose without having to properly prove their entitlement to take your house! Which goes back to one of my earlier blogs “Foreclosure Defense… It’s About Justice.”
In a recent short, but well written piece in Bloomberg, author and former Wall Street insider William D. Cohan lays out a brief modern history of Wall Street’s continued criminal activity. After being caught red handed at each turn, we are always told, “Don’t worry, we’ve learned that lesson, and it will never happen again.” However, the crimes keep coming….
Most recently, some of us watched as Jamie Dimon testified twice before Congress trying to explain how his bank lost over $3 billion and counting by continuing to make risky, secretive bets. This was all while using some of the $350 billion of their depositors money! Sound familiar?!?! Don’t worry it won’t happen again is what we just heard a few short years ago when Wall Street’s greed nearly destroyed the entire world’s economy prompting a mandatory bailout from Main Street.
We were told the same thing after the bust of the junk-bond market in the 1980s, the internet bubble of the 1990s, the telecom fiasco of the early 2000s, and now the latest seems to be municipal debt. Despite being told that Wall Street’s commission based compensation system that pays huge just to put a deal together no matter how fraudulent or bad it is will no longer do harm, the hits keep coming. The way state and local government officials hire Wall Street firms to raise the billions of dollars their municipalities need to build schools, hospitals, airports and sewers, and provide other essential services is the latest con of the Wall Street mafia.
The Florida Supreme Court issued an opinion addressing mandatory e-mail service on Thursday, June 21, 2012, with an effective date of July 1, 2012. Apparently that was not nearly enough notice for some firms and a corrected opinion and correction notice were issued a week after the initial opinion revising the effective date to September 1, 2012.
As it stands now, e-mail service becomes MANDATORY on September 1, 2012 in civil, probate, small claims, and family law divisions of the trial courts, as well as in all appellate cases. (E-mail service in criminal, traffic and juvenile matters is not mandatory until October 1, 2013.).
Links to the corrected opinion and the correction notice are provided below.
As an attorney representing ordinary people, seeking justice and fairness, against our nation’s largest financial institutions, I find myself only getting more and more motivated over the years. Certainly, videos and interviews like this only fan the flame. Please watch this. The analogy Matt Taibbi makes about half way through involving fake purse sidewalk vendors is brilliant!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VwcpOithag0
Amazing article from Matt Taibbi, here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620
Here are the highlights:
“”Even though some aspects of municipal bond finance are complex, the fraud here was simple,” she told the jurors. “It was about lying and cheating cities and towns in a bidding process that was in place to protect them.”
E-mail service will be mandatory for attorneys practicing in the civil, probate, small claims, and family law divisions of the trial courts, as well as in all appellate cases, when the rule amendments take effect on July 1, 2012. Florida’s Rule of Civil Procedure 1.080, which requires service of every document subsequent to the initial process be made by mail and fax, has been amended to read only:
Every pleading subsequent to the initial pleading and every other document filed in the action must be served in conformity with the requirements of Florida Rule of Judicial Administration 2.516.
The applicable Florida Rules of Judicial Administration, as amended, effective July 1, 2012 will read:
In the latest news, on the heals of GMAC Mortgage/Ally Financial/ResCap filing for bankruptcy just a few weeks ago, another major mortgage servicer filed this week, Franklin Credit. The saying "karma is a bitch" comes to mind. However, unfortunately, those responsible for these failures and the failures of our economy and system of competent regulation of fraud and greed run amok within our financial institutions have not been brought to justice. For a complete list of all the FDIC banks that have failed, click here and for lenders, here.
The Rosen Law Blog
