ALEC Act Would Give Legislatures Power Over AGs

May 11, 2012
 
The conservative group that helped spread Florida's Stand Your Ground gun law across the country holds a closed-door issues conference in Charlotte on Friday. On its agenda is legislation that would prevent a state's attorney general from pursuing lawsuits except as authorized by the state legislature. Peter Overby is at the conference and talks with Audie Cornish.
  TRANSCRIPT

Occupy the Neighborhood: How Counties Can Use Land Banks and Eminent Domain

A foreclosed home in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Photo: Monica Almeida / The New York Times)

Saturday 14 January 2012

by: Ellen Brown, Truthout | News Analysis 

 

An electronic database called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

John O'Brien is register of deeds for Southern Essex County, Massachusetts. He is mad as hell and he isn't going to take it anymore. He calls his land registry a "crime scene." A formal forensic audit of the properties for which he is responsible found that:

• Only 16 percent of the mortgage assignments were valid.
    

• Twenty-seven percent of the invalid assignments were fraudulent, 35 percent were "robo-signed" and 10 percent violated the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
    

• The identity of financial institutions that are current owners of the mortgages could be determined for only 287 out of 473 (60 percent).
    

• There were 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing approximately $180,000 in lost recording fees per 1,000 mortgages whose current ownership could be traced.

At the root of the problem is that title has been recorded in the name of a private entity called MERS as a mere placeholder for the true owners. The owners are a faceless, changing pool of investors owning indeterminate portions of sliced and diced securitized properties. Their identities have been so well hidden that their claims to title are now in doubt. According to the auditor:

What this means is that ... the institutions - including many pension funds - that purchased these mortgages don't actually own them....  READ MORE

 

BofA Borrowers Sign Confidentiality Pacts Before Getting Loan Modifications, Ariz. AG Says

Posted Jan 27, 2012 8:03 AM CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss

The Arizona Attorney General’s office is asking a judge to block confidentiality agreements signed by borrowers who get mortgage modifications from Bank of America.
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne says the agreements are impeding his office’s investigation of the bank’s Countrywide Financial unit, according to the Phoenix Business Journal and Bloomberg News.
One agreement is cited in court documents in Phoenix state court. It provides that the borrower "will remove and delete any online statements regarding this dispute, including, without limitation, postings on Facebook, Twitter and similar websites.” The settlements bar borrowers from revealing unflattering information about the bank, even if they are subpoenaed, according to prosecutors.
Bank of America says in court documents that the confidentiality agreements are not a requirement, and settlement agreements with consumers are “standard fare.”

READ MORE