"Moratoriums" Are really PR Cover for Banks to Continue with Illegal Foreclosures

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida has issued a moratorium on foreclosures. He was acting on behalf of the investment banks that funded his campaign. If they re-start foreclosures on their own they come under attack. But if  the Governor has projected a start date then they are “only following the law.” Another example of smoke and mirrors. In Florida the projected start date is around May 21, 2020. Similar orders exist around the country. Foreclosures will recommence even as the pandemic continues to rage.

Here is a rough transcript of our broadcast on April 2, 2020.

Get it right this time! Foreclosure Moratoriums? Forbearance?

People listen but they really don’t know the meaning of foreclosure moratorium and the meaning of forbearance and how these announcements might as good as what you are being led to believe. But it gives you time to make things a whole lot better. That’s what this show is about tonight. Making things better.

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Some people are trying to say that there won’t be an increase in the number of attempted foreclosures. That’s like saying you can drop a piano out of an airplane and it won’t land anywhere. In just 2 weeks this country has lost 10 million jobs — – a pace  that far exceeds the 2008 recession and even the great Depression.

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All things being equal if people have no income they won’t be making mortgage payments or rent payments. The enormity of this crisis is not and cannot be met by standard stimulus packages. We must find another way and that way, in my opinion, is to make things right.

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And you can make things right for yourself and millions of other people while at the same time stimulating the economy in far greater ways that emergency measures passed in Washington.

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Just as you can lower your risk to nearly zero by taking precautions against the coronavirus you can take steps to protect yourself against the securitization virus. The securitization virus is just an illusion and you can get rid of it if you commit yourself to doing away with the threat posed by Wall Street. You don’t have to play their game.

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This pause in the economy as bad as it is, is also a great opportunity to reassess where we are and how we have been conducting our daily business in this country. As Bill Paatalo says in his blog post today, the ongoing use of false, forged, fabricated, backdated documents continues.

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Those documents do not memorialize any events in the real world. Such documents lie. They falsely imply the existence of financial transactions and the documents contain intensely crafted wording to allow for deniability of liability if the chickens ever come home to roost. Read them carefully and you will find that there is nobody who is accountable.

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Think about it for a moment. If it turns out you prove that the whole thing is a ruse who are you going to sue or blame? The trustee is going to say that it was only acting in representative capacity. If you somehow get a judgment against the implied trust by serving the trustee, you get nothing because there is nothing in the trust. You can’t sue the certificate holders because they were never named individually and the certificates make it clear that the investors have no interest in the loan.

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So then you go after the lawyers who are protected by litigation  immunity. Or the servicer who will say they were getting all their information from the Master Servicer.

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So you go after the Master Servicer and it says it was only acting in accordance with its servicing contract as contained in the PSA. And you go after the investment banks behind all this and find out the statute of limitations has run and now you are fighting to prove that you didn’t know about the scheme.

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And that is why most homeowners lose. They go after pieces instead of attacking the problem at its roots. The ones who persist in the belief that when pushed nobody can come up with proof any transaction where the debt was ever purchased by anyone, they win 65% of the time. 

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Neither moratorium nor forbearance will ever mean that you won’t be subject to continuing false claims for collection, administration and enforcement of a loan on which the underlying debt has already been paid off by the same process of securitization that the banks use to pretend that the debt still exists and that their attorneys and servicers can still enforce. 

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Forbearances and moratoriums granted by such unauthorized and usually nonexistent entities means nothing just as their attempts to collect, administer and enforce legally mean nothing. But if you don’t challenge them then you are very likely to either buckle under pressure, leave your home voluntarily or involuntarily, or get involved in a fight for your life, your lifestyle and your property.

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I’m broadcasting live from Duval county, Florida. This broadcast is brought to you courtesy of contributions form listeners just like you — except for the bank representatives assigned to listen to what I am saying. Please make a donation to the livinglies blog at livinglies.me to support our efforts to help you help yourself.

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So now government and business and banks are announcing various efforts to stave off a total economic  collapse. Moratoriums and have been announced.  Forbearance programs have been announced with little details as to how these programs will impact the average homeowner or renter. Publix just announced that it won’t charge rent to tenants in shopping centers it owns.

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But as usual the devil is in the details. Delaying foreclosure when it shouldn’t have happened in the first place is not the answer. We all know that the Lorraine Brown guilty plea to falsifying over 1 million documents led to a 50 state settlement which netted homeowners a $300 check and maintained the use of falsified documents.

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She was the only one charged in a 50 state scheme involving thousands of officers, directors and managers of companies and departments all aimed at one goal: forcing the sale of homes so they personally could profit. Up till now they have mostly gotten away with foreclosure schemes with the exception of a few thousand cases where they lost or had to settle a and a few hundred thousand cases where they were forced to offer modification terms more beneficial to homeowners than they would have liked to do.

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Insiders in the modification process started virtual businesses for profit where fees were paid in order to guarantee a favorable modification. The entire process has been and continues to be a farce that unfortunately the courts and the legislatures and the executive branches of government take seriously.

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Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff to President Obama, said that every crisis should be also taken as an opportunity. This is our opportunity to get things right so we come back stronger instead of weaker from this ordeal. The last time in 2008 we only got it partly right, but that seemed like enough to allow us to grow again despite being kneecapped by most of the world’s largest financial institutions.

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Those institutions have enough money parked away in offshore investments to weather the coming storm even if it lasts for years. They made trillions of dollars defrauding investors and cheating homeowners out of their homes, their lives, their livelihoods. Nearly all of it is ill-gotten gains obtained through false pretense, fraud and written contracts that were entirely based upon violation of law and public policy.

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We live in a consumer driven economy. If consumers have no money to spend there is no economy. This is fact, not opinion. There is no other way to look at it. 

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For many decades now our public policy has been on a collision course with the economy.  Instead of assuring that consumers have money to spend in the economy through higher wages and minimum wages, we have pursued a course that stagnated wages and replaced the absence of earned money with debt. Any 8 year old can tell you what will happen. Eventually people won’t be able to even pay debt much less pay for goods and services, rent, food and mortgage payments.

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Everyone suddenly agrees that money needs to be pumped into the hands of consumers so they will spend and keep the economy afloat. But consumer budgets include a significant percentage of income devoted solely to debt service. And in the case of credit  cards and mortgage transactions, the debt ceases to exist as soon as investment banks make claims of securitization.

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Contrary to political pundits, recognizing that simple fact will do nothing to undermine the financial system. It only reduces the amount of future income to the banks. It accomplishes what everyone in government agrees is what is needed — an immediate infusion of confidence and capital to people who have been kept down by low wages and high debt.

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The delivery mechanism is not waiting for some bureaucrat to stick his neck out or waiting for Congresspersons or the President to do something. the delivery mechanism is you.

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A moratorium only means that those who would file a claim against you cannot do so until the moratorium is over. In most cases the existing orders on moratorium are over in less than 60 days.  they maybe extended and they may not. 

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But you can bet that the securities brokerage firms on Wall Street and the companies that call themselves servicers are going to press forward with foreclosures as soon as they can because the proceeds of foreclosure are pure profit, fees and revenue.

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Nobody  gets the money to pay down a debt because nobody is holding a debt on its books of account as an asset. So there is nothing to offset. the proceeds of all forced sales of property in securitizations themes all goes to people who are only after profit — not restitution for an unpaid debt. Your ultimate weapon is to ask the right questions at the right time in the right way. Don’t wait for the judge to say he or she wants to know. 

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Forbearance might turn out to be worse the a moratorium for those who are already not paying on a  debt that no longer exists. Forbearance only creates a lag between now and when payments are going to be demanded again by people who have no right to ask for it, much less receive it. The money they say you owe is not being forgiven which is entirely different thing. But here again, like moratorium orders, the offers of moratorium and forbearance from the banks is ice in the winter. They never had the right to collect in the first place. By accepting their offer you are tacitly admitting they have a right to collect.

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This is the time to start sending Qualified Written requests and Debt Validation Letters. Upon response, then you will file a complaint with the CFPB in volume and with your state AG in volume. Unless of course the response is “OK you got us. We don’t own your debt and nobody is showing your debt on their books as an asset or anything else. “ Not likely. There is too much profit in lying about it. And the lies are generally believed by everyone who hears them unless they understand investment banking and how the risk of loss is illegally eliminated in the way securitization has been practiced.

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This is the time  to ask the most simple and basic questions without fear you are going to look stupid. I give you my word that in virtually all securitization schemes they will not be able to answer simple basic questions. But if you don’t force them to answer and then force sanctions upon them for violating discovery orders and then prohibit them from offering evidence of ownership or authority over the debt, they will win. But if you do those things you are likely, very likely to win. And that will force a reckoning with homeowners. When a lot of homeowners do the right thing the right thing will happen. 

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This is the time for getting things right. The question is who is carrying my debt on their books of account as an asset? The answer is nobody if there is a securitization scheme involved. Start creating footprints where you can show a judge in the future that you tried to settle this simple question but you were stonewalled and misdirected.

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And remember that there is no statute of limitations on a claim that does not exist. But a claim that does not exist can be made to look like it exists especially if you help it along by failing to challenge it. 

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Which all brings me to the way to make things right. the banks will hate it — along with all the politicians who support the banks because the banks support them.

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It’s really simple. Don’t allow foreclosure to anyone who cannot prove by clear and convincing evidence that they suffered an actual economic loss rather than a presumed one.This will stop foreclosures dead in its tracks. This will give a respite to all homeowners, not just those who can’t make payments. As the truth becomes accepted reality, people will start realizing that their loan was actually a payment to them as a cost of doing business. The business of issuing multiple layers of securities wherein the loan data was sold an average of 12 times and the debt was never sold.

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Those who would seek to get paid on what looked like a debt at origination of loan documents would need to negotiate with homeowners and disclose exactly how much money they really made off of the signature of the homeowner and the sale of the homeowner’s financial reputation. In the end this will lead to vast reductions or elimination of principal due. But that will also lead to a complete reassessment of the value of derivatives that were issued on transactions that were falsely labeled as loans.

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So use this time for the fight and do what you can for yourself and the rest of homeowners. Maybe other classes of renters and consumers will follow suit and we can break the yoke of bank control over our lives and our futures.

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