I shouldn't say that it's all of them (see D-day on his interview with Brad Miller), but there are far too many who are just being led around by the nose and doing the industry's bidding because they don't want to have to deal with it - and besides, it's easier to get a job making a ton of money if you're accommodating to your possible future employer, right?

David Dayen has a post up on this subject that's instructive; he raises the question of whether there are consitutional issues related to the whitewash.

From the post:

There's no question that making MERS legal would solve a lot of problems for the industry. The question is, can they do it? Here's who Eunjung Cha and Dennis talk (authors of WaPo article) to about that:

• The CEO of MERS, R.K. Arnold;
  
• The deputy executive director of the American Securitization Forum, an industry group who just put out a white paper that claimed MERS was valid and legal (one which Adam Levitin said in Congressional testimony focused on the wrong issues entirely);
  
• Ira Rheingold of the National Association of the Consumer Advocates, but only to get a quote on why it would be a bad thing if this happened.

You can argue about whether creating a federal land title system would be viable, as Rep. Marcy Kaptur and John Taylor of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition wrestle with in the article. You need to argue over whether it's legal to take away the land title system that has existed in this country for over two centuries. Eunjung Cha and Dennis don't bother to do that, because, well, I guess some lobbyist said it was legal.

I do find it interesting who's doing the lobbying for MERS:

Lobbyists working for MERS include people who were prominent legislators or federal officials: former U.S. representative Bob Livingston and his former chief of staff, Allen Martin; John M. Duncan, assistant secretary of the Treasury for legislative affairs in the George W. Bush administration; and Arnold Havens, a former general counsel at Treasury.

Awesome.

I eagerly await the next article from Eunjung Cha and Dennis, when they mention that there's dubious Constitutional claim for the federal government to take control of the state land title system, that the pooling and servicing agreements have standards above that of state or federal law and would not be affected by this ruling, that securitization is governed by New York state trust law and that foreclosures by a patchwork of state laws, and that the entire scheme by the lobbyist class is completely unworkable.

What they really mean by power is the stream of revenue that they are entitled to for transferred mortgages that have to be recorded.  

The rising tide of paper that was choking mortgage loan productivity in the early 1990s provided the impetus for an industry task force to recommend the establishment of MERS in an effort to eliminate the need to prepare and record assignments. MERS would allow mortgage lenders and servicers to cooperate to reduce or eliminate their paperwork burdens and bring a higher level of efficiency to secondary market sales and trades between trading partners. Because secondary market transactions involving the sale of both beneficial rights as well as servicing rights generated a flood of paper mortgage loan assignments, MERS took up the task of providing an alternative to using paper for tracking these transfers between trading partners.

Rick Scogg, president of Aurora Loan Services, Aurora, Colorado, says his company saves hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. "We have already benefited and will benefit considerably more in the future," he says. "We buy and sell servicing frequently. When we buy portfolios, there are payoffs and foreclosures the next day and therefore there is a delay in the lien-release process [for non-MFRS loans. With MERS, we don't need to get attorneys to correct these, and that saves us thousands of dollars a year.

"Truly, the foreclosure and release process is the biggest pleasant surprise for us," Scogg says. "It has had a major impact on our efficiency after acquisitions."