Dude, Where's My Mortgage? How an Obscure Outfit Called MERS Is Subverting Our Entire System of Prop

[Hestia]

Dude, Where's My Mortgage? How an Obscure Outfit Called MERS Is Subverting Our Entire System of Property Rights
Banks have scrambled America's system of private property ownership to the point that no one knows who owns what.
December 16, 2010 |

"For the first time in the nation's history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county." -- University of Utah law professor Christopher Peterson

There is an unbelievable scandal in the making that threatens to subvert our four-century-old method for guaranteeing a fundamental building block of the American republic—property ownership. The biggest reason why you probably haven’t heard much about it is that it involves one of the most generic and boring company names imaginable: Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., or MERS. It is a story of deception engineered at the highest level of power for short-term gain, and another epic failure of the private sector to uphold the laws and traditions of American society, even something as fundamental as property rights.

Created in 1995 by the country's biggest banks, MERS quietly took control of and privatized mortgage record-keeping across the country and, in the span of a few years, scrambled America's private property ownership records to the point where no one could figure out who owns what. This was no accident, and was done by design: MERS was a tool used by America's top financial institutions to pump up the real estate market. Mortgage-backed securities, robo-signers, lightning quick foreclosures, subprime mortgages and just about everything else that went into feeding the biggest real estate bubble in U.S. history could not function without help from MERS. But unlike many of the Wall Street scandals, this one could blow up in the banks’ faces, with the little guy laughing all the way back to his free McMansion, and local governments seeing their empty coffers fill back up with the billions of dollars in unpaid fees that MERS circumvented.

The story begins in mid-'90s with the founding of MERS, Inc. by the nation's most powerful banks, ostensibly with the aim of streamlining and modernizing the process of registering and tracking mortgages. Traditionally, there has been no centralized registry of real estate ownership information, with counties maintaining their own records for properties within their borders—a system that has remained virtually unchanged since colonial times.

snippage...

The most important part of this article - IMNSHO -

The MERS hustle had another benefit: it saved the banking industry—and cost municipal governments—tens of billions of dollars by allowing lenders to avoid paying county filing fees, which cost an average of $30 a pop. According to the AP, if every mortgage tracked by MERS had been resold and re-recorded with a county just one time, the system would have saved the banking industry $2.4 billion in filing fees. In reality, most mortgages are sold and resold a dozen times—sometimes more, which means that MERS extracted at minimum around $30 billion from cash-strapped local governments. "Some counties also use recording fees to fund their court systems, legal aid organizations, low-income housing programs, or schools. In this respect, MERS's role in acting as a mortgagee of record in nominee capacity is simply a tax evasion tool," says Professor Peterson.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/149189/dude%2C_where%27s_my_mortgage_how_an_obscure_outfit_called_mers_is_subverting_our_entire_system_of_property_rights?page=entire
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Now we know why all of a sudden our local gov'ts are cash poor. Anything to wring every mofo dime out of us - there is nowhere to go anymore without paying our feudal overlords.

[JDPriestly]

1. The worst of it is that with MERS holding the information on the mortgages,

you can't go to the county recorder's office and review accurate records. MERS is like a black hole. You don't know what is in it. You simply see blackness, no light.

[Kennah]

2. It's beginning to look a lot like Russia

Nine, teen seven, teen