THE BANKS WIN AGAIN

"A state House subcommittee voted Monday to effectively kill legislation that would have slowed the pace of home mortgage foreclosures in Virginia that is among the fastest in the nation.

With one dissent on an unrecorded show-of-hands vote as the powerful banking lobby looked on, a Commerce and Labor subcommittee sent the bills for more study by an obscure gubernatorial task force.

The action included all House bills addressing what Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, calls "drive-by foreclosures."

Delegate Bob Marshall's bill, which was before the 11-member panel, would have extended the foreclosure notice requirement from 14 days to 45. It would also require that loan and property records be recorded in local courthouses.

"What you saw in there was government of the banks, by the banks and for the banks," Marshall, R-Prince William, said afterward...

...The finance and insurance sector last year gave more than $1.7 million to candidates for statewide office. Of that, a little more than one-third, about $660,000, came from the banking industry."
USA Today

Right now, if your mortgage has been put into the MERS system it's entirely possible that even if you pay the mortgage off you may never be able to get a clear title or be assured that no one else can file for foreclosure against you. The bankers have created a system in MERS designed to lessen their cost and facilitate the sale of your mortgage into the Mortgage Backed Securities investment system that so many mutual funds are a part of. In doing this, the banks and brokers have created a massive stream of wealth directed straight to their pockets while hopelessly clouding the titles of millions and millions of homeowners.

This legislation in Virginia was meant to address this and to place the burden on the banks to prove that they actually, legally held the title to the property they are trying to foreclose on. And it looks as though the banks win again, at the expense of the people, you know, the ones that have, through their representatives, pledged the wealth of future generations to bail out the banks after all their scheming soured.

One of the primary purposes of government is to see that justice is served, that everyone gets what is due them. What justice is there in the banks screwing everybody from both sides and still walking away with the money? Sure, a lot of the properties that the banks are foreclosing on should be foreclosed on. But it should be done according to the law, not the financial desires of the banks. And the fact is, many of these properties would have never had mortgages attached to them if the bankers hadn't lied to get the people that bought the properties qualified. And why did they lie? Because they knew they could make money on the fees and the sale of the note into the MERS system and the packaging of bad loans into mutual funds via mortgage backed securities. From the banks standpoint, this was all gain with no risk of loss. And they want to keep it that way.

So they're using their power wherever they have to, making sure that bills like this one in Virginia never see the light of day.