News from the economic front: Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur tells foreclosed homeowners to become “mortgage squatters”
January 31, 2009
by Violet Socks, Editor
|Toledo, Ohio, is a city awash in mortgage foreclosures. The county employs a full-time clerk just to type up and send out the foreclosure notices. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D), who has represented Ohio’s 9th District for 26 years, is telling homeowners to stay put:
Rep. Kaptur is well-known as an economic populist and champion of working people. In the current foreclosure crisis, she’s urging homeowners to become aware of all the legal and financial intricacies involved — details that may enable them to save their homes.
As the Raw Story reports:
Kaptur is a high-profile advocate of an increasingly popular mode of fighting foreclosures best known for its key phrase: “Produce the note.”
By telling a bank to “produce the note,” a homeowner can delay foreclosure by forcing the lender to prove the suing institution is actually the same which owns the debt.
“During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as securitized packages on Wall Street,” explains the Consumer Warning Network. “In the rush to turn these over as fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage. This is the key to the produce the note strategy.”
And Friday’s segment on this growing foreclosure fighting “movement” was not the network’s first. Earlier in January, CNN explored one person’s strategy in demanding her bank “produce the note,” only to find that the lender had “lost or destroyed” the evidence of debt ownership. Such a revelation can significantly strengthen a homeowner’s position when asking to renegotiate a mortgage.
Rep. Kaptur’s website features a help page for Ohio residents facing foreclosure. The more information a homeowner has, the more likely she or he will be able to negotiate a workout or re-finance with the lender.
~
Interesting note about Rep. Kaptur: she is the longest-serving Democratic woman in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives. Last December The Nation listed her as one of the “Most Valuable Progressives of 2008.”
Right on Congresswoman Kaptur!
Meanwhile, related to this subject matter, here’ a very interesting piece on Shiela Bair and her current collaboration with the Obama administration on the economic/house crisis:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/loaded_for_bair
Violet – I want to send this piece to my representative. Is there a way to link to an individual piece on this web site, or is referring her ot the site and noting the title of the piece the best I could do?
Thanks for this. Maybe Obama should be tapping the caliber of talent like this instead of putting tax frauds in power.
Oh, bravo! For Kaptur and for this great post.
This is completely ethical as it reminds us that the faster financial transactions occur, the more likely they are to have unethical procedures involved.
These actions must be taken to so that in the future trivial things like paperwork are not treated as unimportant.
http://www.DailyPUMA.com
Why is my first post @ 4:37 pm in moderation???
This is what being an elected official is about. What a gutsy woman. She’s not confused about who she’s working for.
This is what makes me sick about the democrats. They claim to be the party of the people, but at the and of the day only a few, like Kaptur, really mean it. Most of them are elitists and republican enablers.
Clinton was talking about the mortgage crisis more than a year before the shit hit the fan, and what needed to be done to save peoples homes. Her party scoffed at her ideas and shunned her like a leper, but she was right! Now the democrats are giving the banks trillions of dollars without any oversight or requirements that the renegotiate the bad mortgages so people can keep their homes. The disgusting part is that our children will be paying for the bankers bonuses long after their parents have lost their homes in foreclosure.
THIS IS WHY THEY SAY THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DEMOCRATS AND THE REPUBLICANS!
I have known Rep. Marcy Kaptur personally for many years, and it is great to see her written about on the blog. She has been an unsung hero on many fronts over the years. This example above is just one in a long line of gutsy moves by Rep. Kaptur. Her district absolutely adores her. She wins with super majorities every single election, often getting over 75% of the vote. This in a district that was a Republican district before she won it.
She also ALWAYS champions women. Any Democratic woman who has run for Congress in Ohio has known Marcy’s heartfelt support. She doesn’t pay lip service—she walks the walk. When I ran for Congress she was the first member of the Ohio Delegation to contact me. She appeared with me many times both in Ohio and at important functions in D.C. She really didn’t have to do any of it because she had to work with my opponent continually. But Rep. Kaptur is one of those rare individuals who does the right thing, not the expedient thing. Thanks Violet for highlighting her in such an appropriate way—–standing up for her people even when it’s not popular.
Marcy is a Hero to us all.
“Cynthia” thanks for sharing that you know her. Please give her our thanks.
Here’s an idea I’ve had; see if you like it:
** Each bank offers foreclosure properties to those who have retirement accounts with them. Allow them to use the security of their account towards the purchase of the property. Set-up a payback plan the same way it would be “if” you borrowed against your “401K”. It’s really just a matter of “shifting” paper; but I believe it could be a “Win Win”. The buyers could be allowed to use rental $$ of the property to return their investment to the account. Maybe they could even “rent” to the “squatters” & they would not have to leave. Again….”Win Win”.
Just-a-Thought.
Sis – Couldn’t have said it better (and if I’d tried, would probably have used a lot more words!)
Cynthia,
I hope you noticed that in my comment, I EXCLUDED, Rep. Kaptur about the democratic enablers. She seems like a wonderful advocate and one of the few who is really fighting tor the people. My point was that if it was a Repub vs. Dem thing, then wall street banks wouldn’t have been given all that money without renegotiating the sub-prime mortgages. All I can say is I hope they don’t marginalize her in Pelosi’s House of Representatives.
KendallJ—-Sadly, Rep. Kaptur’s never played the necessary games to be “in” with the leadership, and as such she’s never been given the respect that she deserves. Also, Rep. Kaptur is not pro-choice, a stand which has knocked her way down in the pecking order. Her pro-life stance comes from her fervent Catholicism. Before she ran for Congress, she was going to be a nun. I find her stand consistent with her core integrity. She doesn’t flaunt her pro-life views, but she stays quietly true to them. I suspect Speaker Pelosi will use Marcy when she needs her. But in the end, she’s probably already been marginalized in the eyes of the leadership. But she’s #1 in the hearts of her constituents, and I’m thinking that that’s a better prize as far as she’s concerned.
I saw Rep. Kaptur on CNN last night, and she made my damn heart sing. She said, screw the banks, screw their campaign donations, screw their bullying, greedy ways, and she stood up for her constituents, big time. Good for her.
Full disclosure: we refinanced our place a couple of years ago. Guess what? We were delayed because THE BANK LOST OUR MORTGAGE PAPERS. Not only that, they got all sticky about making out new ones. Apparently, though, it happens a whole damn lot.
“Cynthia & KendallJ”
She’s #1 to this NYer.
Being pro-life did not seem to hurt Gov Kaine(?) from Virginia.
Maybe Marcy could have a future after all??
Anna, click on the “Share This” icon at the bottom of the post. That gives you options to email the post, link it on a social media site, etc.
Cynthia, thank you so much for sharing that about Rep. Kaptur. I thought it likely that you knew her, but didn’t have a chance to ask you before I wrote the post. She sounds terrific.
I [heart] Marcy Kaptur. She was a populist before it was cool. (Although I have mixed feelings on the squatter thing. Would a representative come out and urge renters who can’t afford the rent to resist being evicted?)
It’s not a parallel situation. The “produce the note” strategy is a legal defense against improper foreclosure by banks that don’t really have documented legal title to the note.
Kudos to Rep. Kaptur!
We need so many more women like her to OUT the prevailing financial abuses and to fight for all of us. If women were running Wall Street, I don’t think the country and world would be in the financial mess they are in now.
Please make sure she sees the wonderful comments about her posted here.
Violet – Thanks for the tip on how to “share this”. I’m a techno ninny! And ditto re: you comment about comparing Congresswoman Kaptur’s strategy re: home foreclosures to rental isituations.
For anyone who wants to contact Congresswoman Kaptur, here is the link to her contact page. Most Reps won’t allow e-mails to go through if the address you type in is not in their district. But, phone calls and faxes are one way around that, though if you identify where you live, the message may carry less weight:
http://www.kaptur.house.gov/in.....038;id=152
If the rental contract had been a shady deal by some large ‘landlord’ corporation in the first place, then I’d support the tenants squatting or taking other means to fight eviction. Especially if there is hope that help is on the way, by a few good people in government fighting for re-negotiation of such contracts.
Speaking of the Stimulus bill, here is some ammunition.
Moreover, it matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02.....=2&hp
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