“Laws and Rules Just Don’t Matter Anymore, Everyone Hop On Board The Fraud Train”!
Now here is an interesting strategy on how to fight fire with fire in regards to the theft of Americas homes.
Now neither I or the author of this article endorse this method, but imagine if people organized by county throughout the state in where each person put up $100. All someone would have to do is search the county records to get the recently filled lis pendens to get the party started.
One other thing that really irks me about all this corruption is not only are some judges “no longer going to hear Motions to Dismiss filed by Defendants in foreclosure cases“, as stated below, I am now being told from a very credible source that a certain judge received SUPERBOWL TICKETS from the Plaintiffs Foreclosure Mill Attorney! (cough cough Shapiro & Fishman cough Judge Peter cough Weinstein cough circuit 17)
Where I come from, we call that a bribe.
Thoughts anyone?
by Matthew D. Weidner, Esq.
Courts Are Overwhelmed With Foreclosures
Across the country, circuit court judges and their staff are becoming overwhelmed and frustrated by the total avalanche of foreclosure cases that have been dumped in their courtrooms. In Pinellas County, Circuit Court judges who used to handle like 400 foreclosure cases are now handling something like 3,000.These judges still have one judicial assistant and the same limited resources the had before the crisis. When the judge’s loan JA sits down to start the day, they are bombarded with phone calls and mail and people in their face every single second….it’s chaos, its a burden and it is completely untenable for the long run.
Things have gotten so bad for the judges that I’m told at least two Circuit Court Judges in Pinellas County (Linda Allan and Douglas Baird) have announced they were no longer going to hear Motions to Dismiss filed by Defendants in foreclosure cases, but were going to start just denying them across the board without even having a hearing on the matter. Now that’s one way to deal with the crisis. It’s an unconstitutional, unfair and totally biased approach that completely ignores the law and the rights of the citizens these judges took an oath to serve, but it is one way to deal with the crisis. (Look for Appeals To Come If This Practice Really Begins to Take Hold.)I know, Let’s Throw All The Rules Out The Window
Many of the Plaintiff’s attorneys that are working so hard to throw borrowers out of their home cannot rely on good, solid, honest legal work to accomplish their job. As an attorney who sees the work of these firms every day, I am just astonished that the Courts continue to allow such horrendous practice to continue unchecked, but there seems to be little desire to try and force a correction of the behavior. Just in case you think I’m overstating the problem, here is an excerpt from the Florida Supreme Court’s Task Force Report on Residential Mortgage Foreclosures
- Finally, it is critical that these firms be candid, clear, and truthful and accurate in connection with pleadings and affidavits filed with the Courts. A leading plaintiff’s lawyer and a major plaintiff’s law firm have been the subject of a public reprimand and sanctions due to untruthful filings with the courts. Judges continue to see affidavits of amounts due and owing signed by law firm employees, and cost affidavits charging very high service of process fees for process serving firms owned by the law firm principals. To some extent, it is fair to be concerned whether the press of the case load is interfering with a judge’s ability to police the conduct of the firms before them in these usually uncontested, unopposed foreclosure cases.
The full report can be found here but the bottom line is this, the lenders and their law firms are lying, lying, lying. They’re committing fraud on the courts on an unprecedented scale. The report of the Supreme Court is a bit sanitized, but the firms are whipping out foreclosure cases so quickly that they’re not even bothering to get the proper documents that prove they have a correct basis to file a suit from the outset. Some firms have ownership interests in the process servers who are supposed to personally hand the lawsuit to a defendant and they’re both charging exorbitant fees for this service and lying about whether proper service has been obtained or even attempted. And finally, the biggie….they’re lying, lying, lying about the evidence they’re submitting to the court, these come primarily in the forms of Affidavits and Assignments submitted to support Summary Judgments of Foreclosure.
Affidavits and Assignments in Foreclosure, Liars Re-Telling Lies Re-created From Fiction
There are several areas where the lying is reduced to black and white and submitted to the court.
Assignment of Mortgage
First, when the foreclosing Plaintiff is not the original lender, there must be a formal Assignment of Mortgage executed which says, “The Original Lender Assigns This Mortgage to the Plaintiff in This Case.” This document is needed to give the Plaintiff the proper legal basis to be suing the Defendant. Many of the originating lenders are no longer operating so getting a real assignment from a dissolved corporation would be difficult. In other cases, the Plaintiff introduces an Assignment of Mortgage executed by “MERS” a shadowy, shifty, shady backroom dealer of mortgages. The Assignment of Mortgage issue is problematic even when a mortgage was only assigned from an originating lender to the foreclosing Plaintiff, but in cases where a mortgage has changed hands many times, there should be an unbroken chain of properly executed assignments from originating lender straight through to foreclosing Plaintiff. (In fact, this requirement of an unbroken chain of assignments was originally part of the foreclosure procedures in Pinellas County, but this requirement was stripped.) The problem is these assignments are frequently fraudulent. The lenders know this, their attorneys know this and the courts know this, but they’re all just going ahead and pretending like it’s not an issue. IT IS AN ISSUE!
Affidavit of Amounts Due and Owing
The second area of Affidavit Fraud is the Affidavit of Amounts Due and Owing which states, “Your Undersigned Affiant is an employee of the Plaintiff and I SWEAR Based on my PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE that the Plaintiff is Owed, $150,000″. In a case where the original lender is the foreclosing Plaintiff, an employee of that lender could sign such an affidavit based on their review of the company’s accounting records. In most of the foreclosure cases currently pending in courts around the country, the mortgages have changed hands many times and there is simply no basis whatsoever for any person to sign an affidavit stating that they have any knowledge whatsoever of who is owed any money whatsoever. These affidavits are legally insufficient, they’re false and fraudulent.
Affidavit of Lost Note
The third area of Affidavit Fraud is the Affidavit of Lost Note which states, “Your Undersigned Affiant is an employee of the Plaintiff who had posession of the note when it was lost and while we looked long and hard to find the note, it’s just plain disappeared and we just will never find it.” In cases where the Plaintiff cannot locate the original note, this Affidavit is required in order to “Re-establish The Lost Note”, a technical process which must be followed in order to successfully and honestly proceed with a foreclosure case. There are two problems here. First, in many cases, the Affidavit does not include the correct language wherein the Plaintiff asserts that it was in possession of the note when it was lost. The affidavit states, “the note was in possession of someone (we don’t know who) when it was lost”. The other variation of this is when the Plaintiff is in possession of the note but they don’t bother disclosing this to the court.
Laws and Rules Just Don’t Matter Anymore, Everyone Hop On Board The Fraud Train!
So if the Plaintiffs and their attorneys are engaging in massive and systemic fraud and the courts are totally aware of this and yet it’s going totally unpunished and unanswered why doesn’t everyone just get on the fraud train? I mean why not? Well here’s one way that consumers and anarchists could engage in fraud that would totally throw the system into chaos. If rebels and anarchists and people who just don’t care executed and recorded Satisfactions of Mortgages across the country, it would send the entire foreclosure system into collapse. A Satisfaction of Mortgage is a one page document that costs $8.50 to record. It can be produced on a home computer, filled out correctly then sent in along with a money order or cashier’s check. The Clerk of Court is required to record it and there would be no way of ever knowing where these fraudulently produced satisfactions were coming from. While the lenders were trying to figure out how to deal with this massive problem, they would have no choice but to stop the pursuit of the foreclosure cases.
4closureFraud
www.4closureFraud.org
Please excuse typos spotted after a rushed comment.
I’m an attorney fighting foreclosures on behalf of borrowers. I appreciate and agree with virtually everthing published in this blog and Matt Weidner’s and commend their efforts against the banksters. Unfortnately, the majority of the public, legislature and judiciary don’t understand the nature of this criminal enterprise and hearts and minds need to be won to effectuate real change, especially change beyond election year posturing of the attorney general, however legitimate the fraud claims may be. That said, I must criticize the use of the Nazi stormtrooper analogy. Throughout history, Nazi comparisons have fallen flat, have been largely counterproductive and usually deemed offensive. It’s very hard to avoid hyperbole and the disdain likely to result from equating anyone with a genocidal totalitarian regime that killed millions, unless your talking about Pol Pot. The lending industry, Wall Street and all their minions and facilitators deserve our wrath, but we will not get the credibility our movement deserves with histrionics like Nazi comparisons, especially when their is a fair amount of “grey area” attributable to some borrowers who have been less than forthright in this crisis.
The point is that history has shown that when judges begin to ignore the law and the rights of average citizens things usually go from bad to worse very quickly. The horrors which resulted when judges did so in Nazi Germany is an example that people are very familiar with.
The tendency of judges to ignore the rights of citizens is one of the reasons why the Framers provided for jury trials for all crimes in Article III § 2 and the 6th Amendment and in all actions at common law when more than $20 was at stake in the 7th Amendment.
Alexander Hamilton explained that it is much easier to improperly influence a standing body of judges than it is a group a citizens summoned to serve on a jury. In the Pennsylvania dissent to ratification which was the basis for the Bill of Rights, Samuel Bryan (quoting Blackstone about the seizure of power by the aristocracy in Sweden) said, “that trial by jury and the liberty of the people went out together.”
Of course, these rights to trial by jury began to be undermined by judges who wanted more power shortly after ratification. Judges claimed that the right to jury trials under the 7th Amendment did not include “equitable” proceedings like family law, bankruptcy, probate and foreclosure in spite of the fact that the Pennsylvania dissent explained the need for an amendment providing for a jury trial in all civil proceedings and used the abuses of courts of chancery or equity as examples of why trial by jury was necessary in both civil and criminal proceedings.
Although a note and a mortgage are contracts and many questions of fact concerning these contracts are still supposed to be questions for the jury, many judges simply ignore controlling precedent to rule in favor of the rich and powerful. Of course, due to the government controlled “educational” system, most people, even judges and attorneys, have no idea that ignoring controlling precedent is a felony violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. See U.S. v. Lanier, 520 U.S. 259 at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-1717.ZS.html By the way, Lanier is about a judge being prosecuted.
See my comment below to learn more about how liberty and justice were supposed to be secured under the U.S. Constitution.
This was actually tried by Karen Tappert, but she and others who tried a similar strategy of just making up documents and filing them have been indicted. See http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jun/18/partial-list-accused-operation-stolen-dreams/ and see the indictment at http://www.creditorcentral.net/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Karen-Tappert-indictment-2.pdf
As a comment to the Law Vegas Sun points out, the banks and their attorneys get away with filing fraudulent documents all of the time, but if normal people try it, they get prosecuted. If you are starting to wonder whether we really do live in a land with liberty and justice for all since some people, such as banksters and their lawyers, can commit crimes without any consequences and others get prosecuted for such crimes, then you are not alone.
If anyone wants to know how liberty and justice were supposed to be secured, see Why Does the Government Ignore Our Wishes? at http://dailycensored.com/2009/09/11/why-does-the-government-ignore-our-wishes/ and don’t miss my short speech.
If you take a look, you’ll learn why banksters, their attorneys, regulators, and judges can get away with violating our rights, abusing their power, stealing homes and committing horrible crimes. My article on torture includes a link to the U.S. Supreme Court case which explains how one of our stolen rights makes the difference between justice and injustice, between freedom and slavery.
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