My pride as a Kansan, though generally strong, is a hot and cold affair. For the first day of autumn, things are running hot!
In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler (full ruling), 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages.Ellen Brown
Author, Attorney
As attorney and homeowner advocate Neil Garfield said, the implications cannot be overstated here. What I love about this ruling is that it takes a seemingly indecipherable morass like the mortgage market of the last twentyish years and boils it down to the simplest of contract law principles. Garfield explains, “the splitting of the note and mortgage creates an immediate and fatal flaw in title.”
“The splitting of the note and mortgage creates an immediate & fatal flaw in title.”
Bam. Done. Case Closed. Thank you, Kansas Justice! Or as Matt Taibbi puts it, “It seems that a court has ruled that about half of the mortgage market has been run as a criminal enterprise for years, which would invalidate any potential foreclosure proceedings for about, oh, 60 million mortgages.”
Now, for those of you that want a bit more of the mucky-muck, I’ve got more detail from Ellen Brown after the jump and it is still quite digestible. Also, what does this mean for actual human beings, you ask?
Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 22
Neil Garfield on the Kansas Supreme Court Decision that blocks many foreclosures in the state of Kansas and sets precedent for the rest of the country:
This is one state, but it is likely to serve as the basis for most appellate opinions rendered on securitized loans. The tide has turned. The moral of the story is that those encumbrances (mortgages) don’t exist in most cases, the foreclosures were all fatally flawed, the people who have been chased out of their homes, still own those homes, and the parties seeking to enforce the note can do so only as unsecured creditors and only if they prove that they lent the money that funded the loan and only if they are willing to be subject to counterclaims, cross claims, affirmative defenses and defenses of the borrower relating to predatory lending, appraisal fraud, securities fraud, rescission under all available theories of law, damages, treble damages, punitive damages, exemplary damages and consequential economic damages.Neil Garfield
Attorney and Homeowner Advocate
Image: Richard Jones/Sinopix
Thousands of ships float off the coast of Singapore and Malaysia. Never before photographed, this armada exceeds the U.S. and British navies combined.
First we find out about the trash continent, now we have this lost armada of consumerism. What else is just languishing out in the ocean, hidden in plain sight?
Thanks, Jill!
I am an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at Johnson County Community College and an independent multimedia communications consultant. Politically, I defy labels. Philosophically, I believe that Ella Wheeler Wilcox was correct when she said, "To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men."
We owe no allegiance to any government. They owe abject allegiance to us.
Corporations are not human. Non-humans have no inalienable rights.
Single-payer or bust!
It is impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to sleep.
All donations secured through PayPal.
Watch the latest episode of the only truly independent broadcast news program in the United States, updated Mon-Fri.