subject: Why MERS should be dismantled [print this page] Why MERS should be dismantled Why MERS should be dismantled
Suing for quiet title,winning the MERS shell game
A shell game pre-supposes a gamer and the gamed. The gamed, I would suggest, are the judges. At this point, mostly lower circuit court judges and US district court judges. The gamer? Well, we all know its the banks. The banks have sold all of these notes into securitized trusts. MERS is the shell (or shells). MERS is owned by the banks. MERS was created as the "New national land record repository". MERS purportedly stores electronic copies of promissory notes for all mortgages with a MIN number on the first page of the deed of trustand, through its own proprietary software programs, allegedly maintains updated information on who the current Holder of Record is for each note. This registry of notes, among other more diabolical things, allows the notesto be traded likestocks on a stock exchange. Prior to the existence ofMERS, the note and the parties of direct financial interest to the note were recorded in the local land records at the County level throughout the country. Prior to MERS' existence, a homeowner could go into the land records and, fora couplecents a page, obtain a printed copy of their note and deed of trust and anyone with any cause for curiosity could see plainly who the actual lender with a real interest in the promissory note was. Anyone with anyflavor of curiosity about that mortgage transaction such as the press, the IRS, the homeowner, a homeowners' attorney or a high school kid doing a book report onmortgagescould go see who the realparty of financial interest was to a promissory note for any property where real property was pledged in the form of a deed of trust to secure the note. If someone or some bank who owned the note wanted to transfer the note through sale or gift or estate, the land records would be updated at the local level for everyone to see and a recordation tax would be paid at the time of transfer to support the people at the county clerks office providing these services.
At the advent of MERS, this bastion of our recordation system was rendered obsolete, to the detriment of every owner of real property in the United States.
Here are the problems with MERS as I see it:
An utter and complete lack of transparency, which allowed non parties of interest to initiate and effect foreclosures. Yes, with this MERS system in place (doubly true for non-judicial foreclosure states) any party with ANY INFLUENCE OVER MERS can effect a foreclosure. If you look at who owns MERS, it is the who's who of mortgage originators and mortgage servicers. Here are some of the shareholders:
American Land Title Association,Bank of America,CCO Mortgage Corporation,Chase Home Mortgage Corporation of the Southeast,CitiMortgage, Inc.,Commercial Mortgage Securities Association,Corinthian Mortgage Corporation,EverHome Mortgage Company,Fannie Mae,First American Title Insurance Corporation,Freddie Mac,GMAC Residential Funding Corporation,Guaranty Bank,HSBC Finance Corporation,Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation,MGIC Investor Services Corporation,Mortgage Bankers Association,Nationwide Advantage Mortgage Company,PMI Mortgage Insurance Company,Stewart Title Guaranty Company,SunTrust Morgage, Inc.,United Guaranty Corporation,Washington Mutual Bank,Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.,WMC Mortgage Corporation.
Did you notice that not only are the largest national mortgagelenders involved but also those who insure titles and those who sell default PMIinsurance. These guys made sure they had players from all over the Stratego board to protect them when it went sideways. Well, its sideways now.
So here's their playbook.. MERS completely obfuscates who the real party of interest is. MERS actually has a homeowner query available at:https://www.mers-servicerid.org/sis/ to allegedly show homeowners who their servicer and who their investor is. But they lie to us all at this portal. It is not clear if they even know who the investor is if all is told. Second play: Once a servicer decides it is time to foreclose (because they make fees foreclosing, it's in their contract), they send an email to MERS (who has been named a beneficiary or a nominee of the beneficiary on the deed of trust for the mortgage) telling them to substitute a trustee through assignment at the county for the investor. So MERS has one of their Robo signers sign an assignment as a VP of MERS or Assistant Secretary (even though they work for the lender and get their pay check from the lender and have never even met anyone from MERS) and they file this completely fraudulent set of documents at the County, generally with no input from the investor..The true party of interest probably has no freakin' clue what has transpired here.The servicer probably has no clue who the investor is. MERS probably has no clue either, as thesenotes are traded like electronic baseball cards. Now a segue..
The purported investor probably doesn't own the note. They dont know it, but in their greed, the originator, the investment bank, the DTC... none of them have actually transferred the notethrough endorsement to the trust and the investment bank selling the MBS to investors is committing securities fraud selling interests in these notes to investors who trust in the Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers or Merril Lynch brands, and unwittingly purchase them. To cover up their fraud, deceit and in an interest to save their golden goose, the banks and investment bankers foreclose ,foreclose, foreclose. They have their Robo-signers sign, sign, sign.They have MERS assign ,assign, assign. They are hoping that they can foreclose on all of these homes using MERS as their straw-man as the party at interest in court and sort out all of the dollars later.
Back to the shell game. If MERS cannot find the note or has lost it or worse, then they dont know who the party really is, they can foreclose anyways. They can foreclose by accident on the wrong party. They can create whomever they want to on the assignment to foreclosure and the judges have no way of checking out if the foreclosing party is real.Yet the judges give the lenders the benefit of doubt, unless it is challenged. They could put Donald Duck on the foreclosure assignment as the assigning party, and in many many cases, get away with it. They can foreclose on people who are current on their mortgage. They can foreclose on someone who owns their home outright who has not effected an updated deed. MERS allows anyone at anytime with any influence over MERS to foreclose on real property without any proof of standing or capacity to foreclose because the judges give the banks a presumption of correctness. They allow foreclosure on affidavit. They allow foreclosure on the face of a case even when the face is just a couple of illegally signed documents for a party of interest that does not exist. That is, unless you have a securitization audit and an attorney. While my belief is that MERS is a monstrous fraud machine built to illegallytransfer wealth from a pretend middle class to the wealthyand should be brought to the ground, I am more concerned about thecomplacencyof the Courts. How is it that even as this monster has been revealed across this nation in case after case aftercasethat the Bar Associations have not demanded transparency from MERS.Why havn't the judges demanded it? Why won't congress? Why is it that congress is even entertaining making MERS anything other than a heap of burnt rubble. If they really do know who owns the notes why do they not have a real-time query portal where the MIN number can be typed in to find the real current up to the minute investor? If this transparency is not the answer then the question is not how to solve this, it is how to hide your tracks. We know what you are hiding. You dont care where the notes are.Transparency does not help you when many of these subprime notes have been paid in full by PMI or credit default swaps. It works in your favor when the judges are complacent. They will wake up. Landmark v Keslerwill beyour undoing. "Indeed, in the event that a mortgage loan somehow separates interests of the note and the deed of trust, with the deed of trust lying with some independent entity, the mortgage may become unenforceable.""impossible for the holder of the note to foreclose is the agent of the holder of the note. Without the agency relationship, the person holding only the note lacks the power to foreclose in the event of default. The person holding only the deed of trust will never experience default because only the holder of the note is entitled to payment of the underlying obligation. becomes ineffectual when the note holder did not also hold the deed of trust.
The practical effect of splitting the deed of trust from the promissory note is to make it impossible for the holder of the note to foreclose, unless the holder of the deed of trust is the agent of the holder of the note. " (From Landmark v. Kesler)
