Florida

So, which is it? Who is lying?

“Operating against the backdrop of well-documented disarray and fraud in mortgage documentation, the shortcuts taken in Lee County courts mean that homeowners may never have a meaningful opportunity to refute faulty evidence supposedly supporting foreclosure.”

Just in case you all missed this outrageous Fraudclosure "settlement" from Florida AG Pam Bondi.

After a month and a half ago, a Virginia Judge found a key provision of the healthcare law unconstitutional, today Judge Roger Vinson from the federal district court in Florida has found the entire healthcare law void. "I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the Act with the individual mandate," Vinson writes. "Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void."

It seems that Mr. Moraitis is more concerned that our judiciary become an auction house instead of a place where constitutional rights and due process of law is upheld.

Not as entertaining and colorful as the original report but interesting none the less...

Is Florida's pension fund broke?

UNFAIR, DECEPTIVE AND UNCONSCIONABLE ACTS IN FORECLOSURE CASES

After Matt Taibbi stirred popular spirits last week with his expose on the Rocket Docket foreclosure mill currently operating in Florida, today CNNMoney's Poppy Harlow follows up with a look at just what happens at the front lines of the foreclosure mess. Per the report, “judges are signing off on up to 25 foreclosures an hour. That's one about every two minutes.” The official story, for those who have not had a chance to read Taibbi's piece, is that since Florida has the second highest foreclosure rate in the country, it is stuck with a huge case backlog that must be cleared. The goal is to clear 62% of the back log in one year.  These special foreclosure courts though, have become highly controversial, with critics dubbing them “rocket dockets,” and claiming judges are rushing through cases, unfairly favoring banks over homeowners. For once, we get the judges' side, which is rather hilarious: "there is no evidence, nothing has been presented to us in the 4th circuit, that there is any fraud being perpetrated upon the court. What is classified as fraud, can also be classified as sloppiness, can be classified as neglect, but the legal aspect of the word fraud, we do not experience that." Could it also be classified as bribery by the TBTF lobby we wonder?

We received something troubling in the tip box.

Maybe, just maybe, this will light a fire under the ass of Attorney General of Florida and force him to initiate an injunction on the law firms that perpetrated the frauds… What is it that William Black said?

“The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One“

Well How about this…

“The best way to stop a criminal investigation is to become one of the investigators“

As we pointed out last week, a certain judge in Florida set quite a precedent when he found that JPM, as servicer for a Fannie mortgage, had committed court fraud by foreclosing while not in possession of the actual mortgage. We then concluded that "The implications for the REO and foreclosures track for banks could be
dire as a result of this ruling, as this could severely impact the
ongoing attempt by banks to hide as much excess inventory in their books
in the quietest way possible." Not a week has passed since, and we are already proven right. Today, Bloomberg discloses that GMAC Mortgage, a unit of the affectionately renamed Ally Bank, has halted all foreclosures in 23 states, including Florida, Connecticut and New York. Who would have thought that being caught with your pants down, doing something so blatantly illegal as collecting on something you do not own, would actually have adverse consequences. And GMAC is just the beginning - we expect many more mortgage servicers to scurry now that the light has been shone on their shell game. The silver lining - the permabull pundits will cheer this development now that foreclosures will plunge off a cliff as mortgage holders and servicers scramble to reconcile who owns what, and just on whose balance sheet the mortgage flows should show up.

Media coverage of the oil spill’s effect on the Gulf focusing on tourist income lost by the waterfront towns – with footage of empty beaches, restaurants and T-shirt shops – dominates the news. Interviews with devastated business owners are heart rending. But they always end with references to somehow hanging on until “things get back to normal.” Trouble is, things are not going to “normalize.” Not for the Panhandle of Florida, and probably not for the rest of the state, either. Projections suggest that Florida can expect oil all along its west coast, and possibly throughout the Keys and up the east coast as well. Yet even before BP’s well began spewing crude, pressures within the state’s economy were building. It was an explosive situation awaiting a match. Oily beaches and dying wildlife are likely that match.

Chasing bigger investment returns, the agency that manages Florida's $113.8 billion public pension fund wants to make far riskier investment bets.

Some bad news for our Tampa Bay/Mons Venus-based (yes, they do have WiFi) readers: globalresearch.ca notes that Florida "faces severe fresh water shortages and power blackouts if the thick crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster clogs sea water intakes at the largest seawater desalinisation plant in the United States -- the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalinisation Plant at Apollo Beach in Tampa, Florida." And some even worse news for America's purported democratic/free speech regime: "The Obama administration has taken a page from the government of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Chernobyl in censoring the bad news from the Gulf oil mega-disaster. The Chernobyl cover-up largely resulted in the hastening of glasnost and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union."