Robo-signers, MERS, Slandered Titles

and the Terror Lurking

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble

By George W. Mantor

Introducing the latest pawn in the giant shell game known as “debt
securitization.” Oh, it’s a labyrinthine arena in which up is down, good is bad, the
lowest level of employees are called “Vice Presidents”, and failure is way more
profitable than success.

Here now come the “Robo-signers” who sat at tables and signed thousands of
documents per day swearing, “under penalty of perjury”, that they knew the
documents were real and not forgeries, and then compounded the fraud by
declaring themselves Vice Presidents of whatever bank would have needed to
sign the documents, way back when.

Depositions reveal that these “Robo-signers” had absolutely no knowledge of

anything they were swearing to, and didn’t even understand how they got to be
Vice Presidents.

And yet, those bogus affidavits are actually irrelevant to the larger issue of what
the phony paperwork conceals and what it means to 65 million homeowners.
Why would they not just submit proper paperwork in the first place?

Because it does not now, and never did, exist.

The biggest joke in the whole securitization scam is that they weren’t securitizing
anything. Nada, zippo, zilch. The trusts don’t own anything. It doesn’t really
work that way. The end result is a humpty dumpty scenario…it cannot be put
back together again. Not without massive forgeries.

Loans that were bundled into pools for the purpose of securitization were never
properly transferred. Real estate law, cumbersome though it may be, requires
the physical transfer of documents when an interest in the property changes
hands. This is known as an assignment.

But, the notes intended for securitization were never endorsed because they
were intended to be the security in multiple pools.

Because the assignments were never properly transferred and recorded, the
foreclosure mills have tried to go back after the fact and recreate the
assignments.
To do that, they needed to “create” all of the missing assignments in the
securitization chain.

That required them to design, write, back date, and digitally print fictional
documents for what would be, at minimum, four and possibly hundreds of
transfers. These would then need to be signed (endorsed) by the transferring
party after the fact, and then the signature would need to be notarized.

In some cases, the notaries were in states other than where the documents were
signed, and some weren’t yet in existence when the signatures were purported to
have been witnessed. Boy, that can be embarrassing.

The “Robo-signers” swore it was all correct and true, but under oath in
depositions, they confirmed that the documentation was completely fabricated.

Before Wall Street became immune to prosecution, this sort of creation of

documents after the fact was considered forgery.

So, what the “bankstas” are referring to as a few little paperwork errors are, in
reality, after the fact attempts to paper over a slandered title.

And, that brings us to MERS: Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems.

MERS shields loan originators from predatory lending claims, takes public
property information private, usurps recording fees from counties and truncates
the chain of title because it does not record and transfer assignments until after a
default has occurred.

In a deposition of R. K. Arnold, CEO of MERS, he admits that they only intended

to assign the notes after a default occurred.

If, as numerous laws require, the transfers had all been properly recorded at the
county recorder’s office, there would be no cloud on title and no need for all of
that perjury and forgery that the “Robo-signers” committed. But, if they recorded
them at the county recorder’s office, a physical impossibility, they would show
how a single mortgage was leveraged many times over by referencing portions of
it in many pools.

But, a few years ago, the “bankstas” and their supporting cast of phony
government agencies cooked up a private registry and stopped recording
transfers publically. And, that is where the trail of mortgages goes cold.
Everyone with a MERS loan has a cloud on title. Even if they keep making their
payments, they will not have marketable title in the event they wish to sell.

And, now that this has all come to light, predatory lending, origination fraud,
servicing fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering,
conversion, unjust enrichment, and forgery and perjury to try to cover it all up,
what are your congressional leaders doing?

Secretly passing legislation to make it all legal. The Bill, known as H.R. 3808 is
intended to bless “Robo-signer” fraud.

Listen to the rhetoric coming out of Washington. The party line is foreclosures
have to occur anyway and clogging up the system over a few paperwork
problems by overwhelmed employees is no reason to give a deadbeat a free
home.

Who says they have to occur? And, what will be the consequences of having 45
million homeless people in our country. No wonder that the fastest growing
category of housing is prison…..just sayin’.

FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, commenting on the forgeries and fraud

revelations, was concerned that constitutional protections of individual
homeowner’s rights would harm the system and that a “global solution” should be
quickly enacted to preempt due process.

Others mention something called the “Moral Hazard” of giving lazy dead-beats
free homes.

So, if I understand this argument correctly, we must illegally evict people from
their homes, deny them their constitutional right to due process, legitimize all
manner of tax evasion for the banks, ignore the fraud, accept forgery and perjury
to “streamline” the judicial process, and give the people that destroyed our
economy a complete pass just so we don’t lose our moral compass.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! That’s WTF to you texters. Where have I heard this
logic before?

Wait, I remember. It goes something like this, “We had to destroy the village in
order to save it.”

Suppose we let them get away with it. Why, because we’ll lose our moral
compass? Or, so financial intermediaries, who make nothing and contribute
nothing can go right on transferring all the wealth to them?

Isn’t there an even greater moral hazard in choosing banks over citizens and
convenience over due process? Having so often referred to ourselves as “a
nation of laws”, we would have to find some other way to define what America
stands for. Submitted for your approval I propose, “Home of the Banks, Land of
the Taxed.”

What it lacks in promise it makes up for in blunt accuracy.

If we allow forgery and perjury to go unpunished, the courts will cease to be
effective. It will be worth watching to see how this aspect of employee culpability
resolves. Keep in mind that we are talking about hundreds of thousands of willful
acts by virtually all mortgage servicers, not a single act by a rogue employee.

Trying to paper over this by “tweaking” the Constitution is a knee jerk reaction
that isn’t going to fix the bigger problem. Beyond the difficulty in identifying the
true creditor is a larger issue of the tax exempt status of the trusts which are
purported to hold the notes.

In addition to making a handful people obscenely wealthy, the plan also allowed
for massive tax fraud on several levels.

Known as REMICS, under the IRS code, in order to enjoy beneficial tax
treatment, the trust (1) must be passive and (2) cannot acquire any new assets
90 days following the trust’s creation.

If the notes were never properly assigned to the trust when it was established,
then the trust does not actually own the underlying mortgages.

If the trusts receive these assignments (assets) at this time, they would have
serious tax consequences.

In many cases, the trusts have already been dissolved and the parties satisfied
with insurance (credit default swaps) or tarp funds. Thus, there is no legal
creditor who could prove standing to foreclose if courts uphold the law.

So, while the judge may be reluctant to give a homeowner a free home, the only
other option is to award it to someone who never loaned a dime and doesn’t lose
a penny, and ironically, is the party responsible for engineering the entire global
economic collapse. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

65 Million Clouded Titles

And, if that weren’t bad enough, the other consequence of this so-called
“paperwork problem” is that if it is not known with certainty who owns the
mortgage in question, it cannot be released. If the title company is not satisfied
that there is a good release on the old mortgage, it will refuse to insure the new
mortgage.

Recent buyers of foreclosures and short sales may have bought into more than
they bargained for. And, because this is about what is missing rather than part of
the record, the only conceivable way to know if there is good title is to go to a title
company other than the one that insured the buyer’s title and ask for a quote to
insure the title in light of these developments.
If they can’t track all of the assignments, they will either not insure the title or
attempt to exclude or “write around” the missing assignments.

The rush, by pretender lenders to foreclose on American homeowners is the final

piece of an extraordinary plan. It is an effort to eliminate the evidence of the
greatest financial fraud in history. That is what the next few months will reveal as
more and more media are forced to confront the facts.

What some are now beginning to acknowledge is bigger than a housing bubble is
well upon us.

The Biggest Bubble Ever

So where does that leave us? It may not matter. Residential mortgages are only
one small piece of the much larger scam. The vast majority of loans, short and
long term, were securitized, leveraged, synthesized, digitized, and used over and
over again in multiple pools.

This is just evidence of the mother of all bubbles: the derivatives market. A
derivative is an unregulated investment vehicle whose value is not its own but
based on something else.

According to the World Bank of Settlements, there are anywhere between $600
and $1,000 trillion invested in derivatives. This is troubling because the value of
everything on the planet is only $165 trillion. Uh-oh. Now that has to be a
problem.

I’m no accountant so I don’t know how you categorize this, but as an ignorant
country boy, I know that if it looks like six people bought and paid for the same
tractor, when they all come to pick it up there’s going to be trouble

Let’s assume, just for fun, that there is $1,000 trillion invested in things whose
value is not their own but based on something else, and not a measly $600
trillion. It doesn’t really make any difference because, except for $165 trillion, the
rest is air.

And, what a lot of air it is. Forget about bailing this out. The annual gross
domestic product for the world is only about $60 trillion, so good luck taking up
the slack when the economy rebounds.

But, the hole doesn’t end with an $835 trillion derivative bubble. This same
counterfeiting has bloated the stock market, bond market, commodities, and
precious metals markets. Wall Street’s profits are derived from making the same
assets appear in multiple places at once.
All of Wall Street’s bonuses are the by-product of a massive international fraud
that suggests that a lot of pension and hedge funds have assets on their books
that are vastly overvalued and often nonexistent.

Despite the generous retirement benefits offered to public sector workers, the
probability is that they will wind up in the same boat as the rest of us, with little to
show for a lifetime of work. Ironically, among them will be judges.

The implications of this vast global over-leveraging are beyond alarming. The
fact that neither end of the political spectrum is even willing to discuss this
inadvertently sends the message that there is no solution, just delay.

Just because a handful of people tried to steal all the money for themselves is no
reason to let them continue or to let them illegally seize what could be as many
as 15 million homes when the dust finally clears.

Where those families will live when their home is gone, how they will work when
their job is gone, where they will learn when the school is closed, who will treat
them when the clinic is shuttered, and what they will eat are the next wave of
problems we will need to address. And, with what?

Governments at all levels have already spent the taxes that future generations
have yet to pay…and there is nothing left.

I’m the most upbeat, and positive person you will ever meet, but as a writer and
researcher, I believe one thing with every fiber of my being…we are headed for
some unprecedented change and it won’t be brought about by politicians, but by
the unintended consequences of their complicity in Wall Street’s attempt to steal
anything that isn’t nailed down.

It will be interesting to watch as, one by one, homeowners begin to understand

the significance of these revelations and bring quiet title actions clearing the
pretender lenders without risking a default.

That should burst the bubble and there won’t be any more “bankstas”.

It was almost the perfect crime. In 27 states there is no judicial review of the
foreclosure process and they met little resistance there. 96% of foreclosures
have been uncontested.

Wall Street engineered record defaults to cover the fraud on their investors.
Now, as more and more people discover the implications for a quiet title suit,
“bankstas” are going to get even more of what they want—defaults.
Strategic defaults and quiet title actions will mushroom. Investors, who couldn’t
walk away, fearing massive deficiency judgments, will have the leverage they
need to negotiate real modifications with principal reductions.

Only when the lie is revealed and the bubble is burst will economies begin to
rebound. A global asset bubble the equivalent of multiple times the values of
everything has already been pricked. It is collapsing. The Fed is at the pump 24
seven trying to delay the inevitable, printing money and giving it to the banks.

How can that work other than to make the dollar worthless?

As for me. I don’t care anymore. It’s going to be so much fun watching all of this
burn that I don’t mind going up in flame. But for most folks, it will probably be just
like the impact of Y2K. They won’t even feel it.

We did just fine before the global profiteers took over. Our communities
functioned and we prospered and took care of our own. Before big global retail
there was Main Street. I know that I am over simplifying but I also know that
farmers will still grow food.

We may have to go back a few decades in the way we did things but it will get
done. Even if we have to do it the old way. And that could be the opportunity that
propels us forward as a stronger nation.