occupy your home

oom_v003 occupy your home

Living By Default
Read this by James Suroweiki in the Dec. 19 New Yorker about the recent bankruptcy of American Airlines.  His argument is that why is that action considered a smart business choice for a company and a shameful failure by a homeowner.

Attributions and more information:

we petition the obama administration to:
Place a moratorium on ALL foreclosures of mortgages made to individual homeowners belonging to the bottom 99%.
Don’t bail out banks and financial institutions, help individuals, real people like us who need real help and a second chance. These icons of Wall Street are as evil as Mr. Potter in "It’s a Wonderful Life" when he doesn’t return the Baileys' misplaced money. They buy mortgages issued to homeowners by other banks, seemingly with intent to foreclose whether or not they are ruining people’s lives.
Stop ALL banks and financial institutions from foreclosing on people. Place a moratorium on ALL foreclosures of mortgages made to individual home-owners for their primary residences, effective immediately! SHOW THAT YOU CARE about ALL people, not just those with money and influence.
Then let us know how we can help you rebuild this country from the ground up, while keeping our homes.
Created: Dec 03, 2011
Issues: Consumer Protections, Economy, Housing

http://www.examiner.com/food-policy-in-national/food-on-the-table-or-a-place-to-call-home

Will being homeless make it easier for them to find jobs?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/22/the-foreclosure-review-pr_n_1108539.html?ref=housing-crisis
*Though a large-scale review of faulty foreclosures sounds like good news, many consumer advocates fear that the process will prove ineffective, in part because the banks were allowed to nominate their own auditors.
More than four million Americans who have lost their homes to foreclosure potentially qualify for a free, independent review of their cases

But if mistakes are found, it's not clear what remedies are available.





Bob Scheer:



And the really big problem is that 65 million American mortgages are represented by a computer program in Reston, Va., called the MERS program, which is owned by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the top banks. And so when you go into court, you’re really up against a robo-banker, you’re up against a computer system. And that’s why the courts all over the country are throwing cases out, and that’s why 50 attorneys general, Republicans and Democrats, in the states are objecting to the process. We have an amazing crisis now in American homeownership because we turned it over to a computer.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9316886

The disastrous disarray in the housing industry is a direct result of decisions taken during the deregulation frenzy of the Clinton presidency when the securitization of mortgage and other debts was removed from any regulatory supervision. Instead of mortgages being between customers and banks and then being properly recorded by local government agencies, they became poker chips in the Wall Street casino. Tens of millions of home mortgages were recklessly issued with scant reference to their true values and bundled into securities to be sold on the unregulated derivatives market. But in order for there to be sufficient fluidity in the rapid-fire swapping of stock bundles of individual homes, those mortgages had to be unhinged from the valid legal restraints that had governed their issuance throughout most of human history.


October 13, 2010

MERS was the result of a partnership formed back during the Clinton years between Fannie Mae, an ostensibly government-sponsored agency that morphed into a very much for-profit mega-Wall Street hustler, and Countrywide, the largest and most rapacious of the private mortgage marketers. The scam of computerized credit approval and mortgage certification they came up with was subsequently embraced by Freddie Mac, the other huge housing agency, and the leading Wall Street banks joined in the feeding frenzy. MERS owners now include Wells Fargo, AIG, GMAC, Citigroup, HSBC, the two housing agencies and Bank of America. But the courts are increasingly challenging MERS claims to the right of foreclosure since this whole racket, which bypasses the power of counties to register property ownership, was never authorized in the law.

The disastrous disarray in the housing industry is a direct result of decisions taken during the deregulation frenzy of the Clinton presidency when the securitization of mortgage and other debts was removed from any regulatory supervision. Instead of mortgages being between customers and banks and then being properly recorded by local government agencies, they became poker chips in the Wall Street casino. Tens of millions of home mortgages were recklessly issued with scant reference to their true values and bundled into securities to be sold on the unregulated derivatives market. But in order for there to be sufficient fluidity in the rapid-fire swapping of stock bundles of individual homes, those mortgages had to be unhinged from the valid legal restraints that had governed their issuance throughout most of human history.

To engage in the recklessness of turning people’s homes—their castles and nest eggs—into playthings of Wall Street market hustlers, or securitization of the assets, as it was termed, homeownership record-keeping had to be mangled beyond recognition. Throughout the preceding centuries of this nation’s history, the origination of housing loans was between the homebuyer and a lender, both of whom expected to be connected through decades of payments. Until the nuttiness that began in the 1990s when homes became ciphers in a marketable security, the verification of homeownership was a straightforward transaction dutifully recorded by local county governments. If the house was sold, the physical records were changed and available for all to see.

But that didn’t suit the newfangled collateralized debt obligations based on collections of mortgages to be cut in tranches as to their expected risk and sold as securities in an unregulated futures market. To facilitate the scam, the records of homeownership came to be largely maintained without the traditional local paper trail in a new computerized national database. The ensuing difficulty in tracing such ownership is now at the heart of the courts’ objections and the compelling argument for a government-enforced national moratorium on home foreclosures to provide sufficient time to sort this mess out.

Read the full article at:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/invasion_of_the_rob... /


kids:

http://www.archive.org/details/InnerCityBluzPartFour
http://www.archive.org/details/InnerCityBluz-PartEight

see below for more videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXG89QFrmwE