Disappearing American Culture: Our Imminent Social Apocalypse

Elizabeth Warren: We are bailing water out of the boat, but we're taking on more water

MUST SEE Video: GOP to Timothy Geithner: Step down NOW!!

This is AWESOME!  Finally somebody says what we all want to say-he completely screwed up this country!

Prove you are a good American and GET OUT TIMMY!!!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Peter Schiff Tells 1000 Mortgage Bankers They Will Be Jobless

In 2006 Peter Schiff tells over 1000 mortgage brokers they are about to be out of jobs. Watch how he completely nails the coming real estate/mortgage debacle before anyone else even realized it was coming.

via creditor.1441.org

Defective Paperwork Strips Mortgage Holder of Foreclosure Rights

In a Nov. 17 order, District Court Judge Patti Saris affirmed a bankruptcy court order denying the plaintiffs' request to send a question of law to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The case is Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. (MERS) v. Warren E. Agin, trustee. 

The plaintiffs wanted the state high court's take on whether the omission of a borrower's name on an acknowledgement form, which a notary public uses to confirm the identity of the borrower, is a "material defect" that voids the mortgage. In Massachusetts, deeds or mortgages recorded at a county registry of deeds must have a properly executed acknowledgment form. One of the plaintiffs in the June 3 bankruptcy court appeal is MERS, which runs a national mortgage electronic registration system that simplifies the selling or trading residential or commercial mortgage loans. 

The other plaintiff is the actual lender, Countrywide Home Loans Inc., which Bank of America Corp. acquired in 2008. The ruling concerned a mortgage held by debtor Mathew Giroux, who filed a voluntary Chapter 7 case in bankruptcy court in Massachusetts on June 27, 2008. The bankruptcy court granted the trustee's motion for summary judgment on May 21, which allowed him to treat the mortgage as a unsecured debt. Saris agreed with the bankruptcy court that Massachusetts case law holds that the state "requires strict formalities in the execution of acknowledgements." Saris also agreed with the bankruptcy court that Massachusetts courts are likely to follow a 2004 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, In re Biggs, which held that omitting the lender's name in an acknowledgement was not a "purposeless formality." "Although the question of the acknowledgment's validity is a determinative issue, the Court finds the outcome in the state court to be reasonably clear," Saris wrote.

Read More: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435636327&Defective_Paperwork_Strips_Mortgage_Holder_of_Foreclosure_Rights#

How to spot predatory lending in your loan docs-GREAT information

via www.facebook.com

Elizabeth Warren: Financial Rules 'Literally Don't Work Anymore,' Regulations Should Be 'Clear And Painful'

Read More: Congressional Oversight Panel, Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren Consumer Financing, Elizabeth Warren Harvard Law, Financial Firms, James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, Troubled Asset Relief Program, Business News

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Please Help Save America: Sign This Petition To Congress To Stop The Bleeding

Dear Fellow American Taxpayer, please ask yourself:

• If your home is worth less than you owe on your mortgage; 
• If your NEIGHBORS' home is in foreclosure and robbing you of equity in yours;
• If you have tried very hard to cooperate with your lender and they just don't seem interested in helping you; 
• If you don't feel like paying for other peoples' mistakes, but know that if your neighbors' house is on fire, you better call the fire department because yours will burn too.
• If you don't know how you are going to get your equity back after Wall Street stole it from you; 
• If you have little faith that the big banks are remotely interested in having you or any other working Americans stay in their homes;

You are not alone, there are MILLIONS of Americans just like us who are in the same, exact position and feel powerless to do anything. 

Well here is something you can do: You can take two minutes, and click on the link below to sign the petition urging congress to demand more cooperation from the banks, and to shoulder more of the responsibility of the burden they have thrust upon our nation in their lust for unconscionable excess and greed. 

Un-American?  Funny you should say that, we just sent billions of dollars OUT of this country because of them. I think it's damn Un-American. What do you think? Let Congress know, as I have, by clicking on this link and signing the petition. 

Make your voice heard, and stand with the rest of us who have had enough. The link will present you with the letter which you can review before signing.

http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2564/go/692233/

By the way, if you feel it's as important as I do, I hope you will now do our nation the service of forwarding it to those you know who are suffering along side us. 

 Warmest Regards; 

Social Apocalypse

Bloomberg: Main Street Tells Wall Street, ‘Get a Real Job’

    Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street, meet Eric W. Haugaard, a civil engineer who designs water and sewer-line systems for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Haugaard says he had tears in his eyes as he watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, hopeful that politics would get more constructive and the economic crisis would get fixed.     Today, he is disgusted when he thinks about “what Wall Street has done to average, honest, tax-paying, no-loopholes citizens,” and says it makes him ill when he considers that Congress is letting taxpayer-assisted financial outfits get rich “without producing anything of real value to our society.”

via www.bloomberg.com

Geithner Singled Out In TARP Watchdog Neil Barofsky's Scathing Report On AIG Bailout

A brutal report issued Monday by a government watchdog holds Timothy Geithner -- then the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now the nation's Treasury Secretary -- responsible for overpayments that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Shocking article on the corruption and deceit that is happening before our eyes.

For Homeowners, Promised Help Rarely Arrives

Mortgage companies, foreclosure counselors and government regulators disagree on the reasons why a federal program to help distressed homeowners is rescuing so few. 

Rueful laughter rolled through a roomful of housing counselors last week when a federal housing official said mortgage servicers were working hard to assist distressed homeowners. The crowd laughed again when Laurie Maggiano, director of policy for homeownership preservation at the U.S. Treasury Department, announced a new directive under which servicers must confirm receipt of loan modification applications within 10 days and render a decision within 30.

In the terribly polite confines of the conference center at the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan, no one heckled, but front-line foreclosure prevention workers seemed to be engaged in a contest: How many ways can you say "frustrated"?

They are frustrated because while various state and federal initiatives have set out to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, precious few distressed borrowers are actually getting help.

All the laughing was taking place at a Home Foreclosure Prevention Summit sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the bank-regulating federal Office of Thrift Supervision, a national network of nonprofit community development organizations called NeighborWorks and the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, a nonprofit set up by the city to respond to the foreclosure crisis. The daylong conference revealed the breadth of distance between foreclosure prevention workers, who offer free advice to homeowners at risk of losing their homes; banks and servicing companies, who hold the power to rewrite loans; and government regulators.

"I think we need to step it up," said Sarah Gerecke, executive director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at NYU. "What we want is a system that we can rely on and feel secure in."

Few fixes

That's not the current landscape. The Center for New York City Neighborhoods found that of the 4,652 homeowners who've sought assistance from the center's 30 partner agencies since July 2008, 1,429 applied for loan modifications. But only 330—less than a quarter—were offered ways to make their mortgage affordable, the advocates said; it's that they can take months to even begin reviewing an application.

"I am very frustrated with the paperwork with servicers," said Eileen Anderson, senior vice president at Community Development Corporation of Long Island. "In my office we call it a fax-shredder," she said, venting about the difficulty of communicating with loan servicers who, advocates say, habitually lose modification applications.

Cypress Hill LDC has seen an uptick in trial modifications in the past three months, Arlain said, but actual modifications—permanent rewriting of the terms of the mortgage—are slow in coming. And too many trial modifications, which are three-month arrangements during which homeowners have to make the adjusted payments and meet other requirements, end without a true modification offer, he said.

Advocates and servicers cite a host of reasons for the delays and derailments of modifications under HAMP.

Meghan Faux, director of the foreclosure prevention program at South Brooklyn Legal Services, said bad data is leading servicers to deny modification requests. "We need to know the data, to see if they are even using good information," Faux said. "More often than not, when I've been able to check, they've been using inaccurate measures."

Interacting with homeowners in a detailed, individualized way is new for servicers, who previously simply collected payments and fees, said Vicki Bott, deputy assistant secretary for single family housing at HUD. It was Bott's opening remarks that made the foreclosure prevention counselors like Faux laugh. But she and others argued that modifications have been slow in coming because servicers had to hire new staff and set up new offices and procedures to begin participating in HAMP, dramatically re-imagining their work—something that takes time.

"I know that our industry is imperfect and takes patience to work with," said Dana Dillard, a senior vice president of special mortgage initiatives for GMAC Mortgage, who had the unenviable role of representing servicers at the conference. She is a chairperson of the HOPENOW alliance, a collection of lenders, servicers and counseling outfits working to respond to the foreclosure crisis. "We're trying to be innovative, but we are a big ship that takes a lot to turn." Capacity is a major issue for servicers, she said, echoing Bott.

Dillard said unresponsive borrowers also slow modifications, and that borrowers routinely submit incomplete paperwork. In addition, some investors—who own pieces of the mortgages—are resistant to modifications and need to be convinced, she said. She pointed out that the 40-plus servicers in HOPENOW make modifications outside HAMP as well.

Little optimism

Michael Hickey, executive director of the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, said he is not particularly hopeful that the process will get fixed right away.

When the Center for New York City Neighborhoods observed foreclosure conferences in courtrooms across the city last summer, it found servicers and attorneys for the banks routinely unprepared to negotiate payment plans, unfamiliar with the details of borrowers' cases and not empowered to actually make a modification or payment plan offer. The servicers rarely came to court with a phone number for the servicing company that actually led to a person who was authorized to make settlement decisions.

An October report from the National Consumer Law Center suggests it isn't in servicers' financial interest to make modifications. Despite the $1,000 per completed modification under HAMP, servicers make more money continuing to collect fees on delinquent mortgages than modifying them, the report says. A major portion of their earnings is based on a percentage of the mortgage principal. Lowering that principal would cut into their revenue. And even if a mortgage eventually goes into foreclosure, the servicer is made whole, and can collect all those months of accumulated fees at auction. The servicers get paid first—ahead of investors—at auction.

Responding to skepticism about whether servicers actually want to offer avoid foreclosure, Dillard said her industry is certainly on the team. It just takes a while to get up to speed.

"Servicers are used to getting beat up. But we do believe modification is certainly preferable to foreclosure," she said.

During the course of the conference, an estimated 1,662 American homes went into foreclosure.