Foreclosure Victims are told to be Squatters in their Houses by Rep. Marcy Kaptur
With conviction and force Rep Marcy Kaptur (Democrat/Ohio) is telling foreclosure victims to stay on in their houses as squatters. She said, “So I say to the American People, you be squatters in your own home. Don’t you leave”. In a clever way she is exploiting a legal technical point imbedded in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.
These mortgages were contracted and then packaged into securities that were sold and resold by those very banks on Wall Street who are being favoured by the TARP plan. The foreclosing banks often fail to locate the original mortgage loan that ties up the house owner with the toxic loan. Kaptur tells them to ask the banks to “produce the note”.
Kaptur is the only congresswoman from the Democratic Party who has been serving for such a long stretch. Her district spreads along the coast of Lake Erie starting from Cleveland West to Toledo. Here there is an epidemic raging – innumerable foreclosures and staggering unemployment. This is the heart of the Rust Belt. The factories have been shuttered and family farms are spluttering. Kaptur had taken the lead in the fight against North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Now she has been suggesting a radical solution to the foreclosure problem right from the floors of the Congress.
She has been highly critical of the failure of the bailout plan to give protection to the house owners threatened by foreclosure. She tells the victims to “squat”. Kaptur’s argument is based on the legality of possession being nine tenths of the law. Thus she argued they should continue to hold on to their properties and hunt around for the right type of legal representation.
If Wall Street failed to come up with deed or the audit details of the mortgage the homeowner had every right to continue to stay on the premises. She added, “Most people don’t even think about getting representation, because they get a piece of paper from the bank…” The very name of the bank instills fear in them. They fail to reason calmly that in contract law there are two parties – one is the bank and the other is the house owner. The latter should find out the legal rights provided by the contract.
She further explained, “If you look at the bad paper, if you look at where there’s trouble, 95% to 98% of the paper really has moved to five institutions.” Her view is that the mega banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wachovia, HSBC and Citigroup are holding back the country by its neck.
