Yves Smith-

Readers may know I don’t do political endorsements. I’m making an exception because I’ve worked with Lisa Epstein and am extremely impressed with her knowledge, energy, and tenacity. And separately, readers may have come to recognize that county clerks and registers of deeds can be very important guards of the integrity of property records and legal processes. But only a very few, such as Jeff Thigpen in Guilford County, NC, and John O’Brien in Southern Essex County, Massachusetts, have bothered to investigate their own files and speak up about the large-scale problems they have unearthed.

Lisa is an oncology nurse who has become a self trained and formidable mortgage document and foreclosure procedures (as in abuse) expert. When I was invited by the Pew Charitable Trusts to pitch on a grant opportunity to do research on foreclosures, I asked Lisa to join the proposal team because I had already seen the caliber of her work and her ability to ferret out information and devise analyses quickly (short version of long story: we got approved but turned down the grant due to, among other things, Pew’s contract. For instance, they insisted on the right to audit my books and records even though this was a fixed dollar amount, and pretty modest grant, and I told them they could pay us in arrears, after we had submitted the final report and they had accepted it).

[NAKED CAPITALISM]

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