The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

via Victims of Foreclosure Check In to Shelters – NYTimes.com.

How great is America? We’re so great that we’ll foreclose on great grandmothers, let them live out of their car and sleep on friend’s couches.

I’ve heard about this a while back but I think it’s an important tactic if you need to use it.

It’s called the “produce the note” strategy, and amounts to the consumer demanding that the lender furnish the original paperwork — the actual promissory note — that serves as the official legal record of the loan.

It is a document that contains the homeowner’s signature and proves that the lender threatening foreclosure is in fact the owner of the mortgage.

The technique is proving effective because so many mortgages written during the latest housing boom were sold, resold, sliced, diced, aggregated, and securitized to the point that the original loan documents might have been lost or even destroyed.

If the consumer demands the note and the lender can’t produce it, the foreclosure process could be stalled or, in some cases, stopped altogether. The Associated Press reports that a Cleveland judge threw out 14 foreclosures in 2007 because plaintiff Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. was unable to “produce the notes.”

If they can’t produce the note do they really own it? Who owns it? Most likely if this strategy catches on you’ll see a phalanx of lobbyists hitting the Hill trying to get this law changed. Since lobbyists and the corporations they work for control a lot of Washington use this tactic while you can.

This has got to the most depressing thing I’ve seen today anywhere. I happened to see this on The Nation website and got to learn more about the American News Project as well. It’s good to see something like the ANP happening and they are in the area on 17th Street NW DC .

I got this ACORN media advisory today and considering the post I just read on Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog—I think this is important.

National City, the seventh largest mortgage servicer in the nation, is responsible for 1.2 million loans valued at $187 billion. Many of them are delinquent or will soon become delinquent. In order to prevent all of those loans from going into foreclosure, massive numbers of streamlined modifications are necessary. ACORN is demanding that National City provide fixed-rate, affordable modifications to all delinquent loans that they are responsible for servicing.

WHO: ACORN Members

WHEN: Tuesday, July 29, 2008

WHERE: National City Mortgage, 1801 Old Hwy 8 NW Suite 123 & 123 New Brighton, MN 55112

TIME: 11:00 a.m.

“As one of the larger lenders that fueled this crisis, and as one of the largest mortgage servicers in the nation, National City has a responsibility to solve this crisis with swift and decisive action to save the homes of hundreds of thousands of families,” ACORN member Al Ynigues, said, “Your slogan is, “We care about doing what’s right.” Now is the time for National City to prove it.”

As for the post I read today on Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog she talked about people who are facing foreclosure committing suicide.

Dry your eyes, already: Death is an effective remedy for debt, along with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If you can’t pay your debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition – like an ever-rising number of Americans – you’re no longer needed at the workplace, then there’s no further point to your existence. I’m not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies actually want you dead, but in a culture where one’s credit rating is routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, “Just shoot me!”

The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It wasn’t God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the credit crisis. Actual humans -often masked as financial institutions – did that, (and you can find a convenient list of names in Nomi Prins’s article in the current issue of Mother Jones.) Most of them, except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high rollers, fattening themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know it’s so 1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?

This is why what ACORN is beginning to do is so important. People have more power than they think they do.

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