But in reality, it's the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core -- with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets.
Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it -- and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.
And that's just the economic side of the story. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat -- and scary as hell to watch.
If you're foreclosing on somebody's house, you are required by law to
have a collection of paperwork showing the journey of that mortgage note from
the moment of issuance to the present.
You should be able to see a record of the originating lender (a firm like Countrywide) selling
the loan to the next entity in the chain (perhaps Goldman Sachs) to the next
(maybe JP Morgan), with the actual note being transferred each time. But in fact, almost no bank currently
foreclosing on homeowners has a reliable record of who owns the loan; in some
cases, they have even intentionally shredded the actual mortgage notes. That's where the robo-signers come in. To create the appearance of paperwork where
none exists, the banks drag in these pimply entry-level types -- an infamous
example is GMAC's notorious robo-signer Jeffrey Stephan, who appears online
looking like an age-advanced photo of Beavis or ButtHead -- and get them to sign
thousands of documents a month attesting to the banks' proper ownership of the
mortgages. But they are enlisting these people as accomplices in fraud.
A bank often claims on paper, in court, that it both lost the note and had it, at the same time. In one case a bank claimed that it had included a copy of the note in the file, which it did -- the only problem being that the note (a) was not properly endorsed, and (b) was payable not to Bank of New York but to someone else, a company called Novastar.
Then, months after its first
pass at foreclosure was dismissed, the bank re-filed the case -- and what do you
know, it suddenly found the note. And
this time, somehow, the note has the proper stamps. But these stamps can be, and are, purchased online!
The bank's new set of papers traces ownership of the loan from the original lender, Novastar, to JP Morgan and then to Bank of New York. The bank, in other words, is trying to push through a completely new set of documents in its attempts to foreclose.
Oh, and there's one other small problem: The dates of the transfers are completely fucked. According to the documents, JP Morgan transferred the mortgage to Bank of New York on December 9th, 2008. But according to the same documents, JP Morgan didn't even receive the mortgage from Novastar until February 2nd, 2009 -- two months after it had supposedly passed the note along to Bank of New York. Such rank incompetence at doctoring legal paperwork is typical in foreclosure actions, where the fraud is laid out in ink in ways that make it impossible for anyone -- except an overburdened, half-asleep and formerly retired judge -- to miss.
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