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I know we are all tied of waiting and the wheels of justice grind slowly. But here is a short video showing that there are people in government that completely “get it.” The tide has turned. But the battle is far from over.
PLAY VIDEO OF SEN KAUFMAN INTRODUCING REPORT
Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: COP, KAUFMAN |
Great, let’s see what they are going to do about it
http://foreclosureblues.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/fdr-wasnt-fdr-until-his-hand-was-forced-by-civil-disobedience/
FDR Wasn’t FDR … Until His Hand Was Forced By Civil Disobedience
Posted on November 18, 2010 by Foreclosureblues
FDR Wasn’t FDR … Until His Hand Was Forced By Civil Disobedience
Today, November 18, 2010, 54 minutes ago | noreply@blogger.com (George Washington)Go to full article
Progressives are disappointed that – contrary to the hype – Obama is no FDR.
But FDR himself wasn’t who we think of as FDR until he was forced by protests, strikes and other forms of civil disobedience.
As historian Howard Zinn wrote in March 2008:
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates [i.e. Obama and McCain] have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War ….
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for ….
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
***For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes—they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting … is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Similarly, Zinn said in 2008:
The obstacles are a kind of resignation that things will go on as before. That’s always the obstacle to change. The obstacle to change is not that people don’t want change. People want change. But most of the time, people feel impotent. However, at certain points in history, the energy level of people, the indignation level of people rises. And at that point it becomes possible for people to organize and to agitate and to educate one another, and to create an atmosphere in which the government must do something. I’m thinking of the 1930s; I’m thinking of Franklin D. Roosevelt coming into office not really a crusader.
Roosevelt came into office, you know, with a balance-the-budgets history. It was not clear what he was going to do, and I don’t think he was clear about what he was going to do, except that he was going to be different from Hoover and the Republicans. But when he came into office, he faced a country that was on strike. He faced general strikes in San Francisco in Minneapolis. He faced strikes of hundreds of thousands of textile workers in the South. He faced a tenants movement and an unemployed council movement. And he faced a country in turmoil, and he reacted to it, he was sensitive to it, he moved. That’s what we will need.
We will need to see some of the scenes that we saw in the ’30s.
Liberal Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig pointed out last week that – instead of mocking the Tea party – progressives should emulate it’s energy:
Many of my friends have been puzzled that I have not been a strong critic of the Tea Party. Indeed, quite the opposite, I stand as a critical admirer…. I am a genuine admirer of the urge to reform that is at the heart of the grassroots part of this, perhaps the most important political movement in the current political context.
My admiration for this movement grew yesterday, as at least the Patriots flavor of the Tea Party movement announced its first fight with (at least some) Republicans. The Tea Party Patriots have called for a GOP moratorium on “earmarks.”
***
This disagreement has thus set up the first major fight of principle for the Tea Party. As leaders in the Tea Party Patriots described in an email to supporters,
For two years we have told the media and the rest of the country that we are nonpartisan and that we intend to hold all lawmakers to a higher standard.
This, they insist, is their first chance for that stand with the new Republican Congress. And the Tea Party Patriots have now mobilized their list to pressure Republicans to support this first and critical reform in the new Congress.
***
Earmarks are … an essential element in the corruption that is Congress today…. they have become the key to an incredible economy of influence that effectively enables lobbyists to auction too many policy decisions to the highest special interest bidder. That economy won’t change simply by eliminating earmarks. But eliminating earmarks is an essential first step to starving this Republic-destroying beast.
***
We do face a common enemy. Special-interest-government is anathema to both the true Right and the limping Left. Progress would be to work together to end it.
Lessig is not alone.
As I’ve previously pointed out, progressives such as Dave Lindorff, political science professor Peter Dreier, economist Dean Baker, Daniel Ellsberg, Jonathan Capehart and many others say that we should be emulating the protest energy of the Tea Party, because we have to raise some hell before anything will change.
In fact, as I’ve repeatedly noted, the whole left-versus-right thing is just a distraction trick. It’s really the American people versus the giant bankers, captains of the military-industrial complex, and handful of others who are benefiting by shafting the average American.
Remember that one of the founders of the Tea Party – Karl Denninger – has slammed the current Tea Party (which was quickly co-opted by the mainstream GOP) for serving the rich and the Republican party instead of fighting against the giant banks, and is calling for non-partisan, Gandhi-style nonviolent resistance to take on the banskters.
And remember that “liberal” George Soros is paying a top aide to “conservative” Sarah Palin.
Of course, some have argued that there are more effective methods of disobedience than protests and strikes such as this or this. I will leave strategy to those who have better tactical sense than I have.
But one thing is for sure: unless we make the lives of those in power a little more uncomfortable, nothing will change.
Note to conservatives who dislike FDR: Glass-Steagall and other regulations against fraud wouldn’t have been passed unless the public had raised hell through protests and strikes.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/11/stoller-a-debtcropper-society-2.html
Stoller: A Debtcropper Society
By Matt Stoller, a blogger-turned Congressional staffer. He was a policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson on financial policy issues. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0.
A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.
It’s actually baked into our culture. The phrase ‘the man’, as in ‘fight the man’, referred originally to creditors. ‘The man’ in the 19th century stood for ‘furnishing man’, the merchant that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies for the year, usually on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into which they were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien places on their crops. When approaching a furnishing agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment, even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts were marked down in a notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they started the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant farmers.
They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty in Arkansas and pronounce it ’shocking’. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.
Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society. I first heard the term “slaves to the bank” from a constituent fighting a fraudulent foreclosure. The details aren’t so important — this couple had been illegally placed in a predatory loan — but at one point, the wife explained that she and her husband were so scared they would have “given their first born to the bank to keep their home”. That was fear speaking, total unadulterated panic. And as we watch debt-holders use the ornaments of fear, such a loan sharking company that set up fake courts to convince debtors they were losing cases, we should recognize that what the creditor class wants is what they’ve always wanted: total dominance of our culture.
Today, the debts do not involve liens against crops. People in modern America carry student loans, credit card debt, and mortgages. All of these are hard to pay back, often bringing with them impenetrable contracts and illegal fees. Credit card debt is difficult to discharge in bankruptcy and a default on a home loan can leave you homeless. A student loan debt is literally a claim against a life — you cannot discharge it in bankruptcy, and if you die, your parents are obligated to pay it. If the banks have their way, mortgages and deficiency judgments will follow you around forever, as they do in Spain.
Young people and what only cynics might call ‘homeowners’ have no choice but to jump on the treadmill of debt, as debtcroppers. The goal is not to have them pay off their debts, but to owe forever. Whatever a debtcropper owes, a wealthy creditor owns. And as a bonus, the heavier the debt burden of American citizenry, the less able we are able to organize and claim our democratic rights as citizens. Debtcroppers don’t start companies and innovate, they don’t take chances, and they don’t claim their political rights. Think about this when you hear the calls from ex-Morgan Stanley banker and current World Bank President Robert Zoellick and his nebulous mutterings pining for the gold standard. Or when you hear Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger talk about how the bailouts of the wealthy were patriotic, but we mustn’t bail out homeowners for fear of ‘moral hazard’. Or when you hear Pete Peterson Foundation President and former Comptroller General David Walker yearn nostalgically for debtor’s prisons.
Unclogging our constipated economy is not a complex problem — we must simply wipe out the bad debt that cannot be paid back. The complexity of the problem lies in the politics. Debtcroppers have no power, except to stop paying their debts. The constituents I worked with on a fraudulent foreclosure eventually did just that. She and her husband, unshackled by panic, began rebuilding their lives, throwing away their indentured servitude to the bank that abused them. They found their dignity, and used the court system to claim their rights as citizens. They fought the man, successfully, and wiped out their debt. And that is a very scary threat to the creditor class, perhaps the only thing they are really scared of.
leapfrog,
Referring to (your) first comment here – you are exactly correct. And, they will “play” in discovery too – it is the name of the game. There is no one to stop them.
Neil,
Oh they get it alright. In the form of big fat checks, fundraisers, campaign contributions etc.. all this is, is ‘Show & Sell’, PR bull$#!t. If he knew ehat the Real problem was he’d be calling all judges, AGs, Governors, obama and everyone in CONgress traitors guilty of Treason.
Wendy Lough,
I’m with you, I’ve lost mine too and am just watching as everyone else unfortunately loses theirs, try to prepare them explaining why it’s happening, with the hopes that WE ALL would wake up to the realization that nothing short of full blown revolution will solve this.
Hey all, here’s a “big surprise”:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/18/mortgage-modification_n_785581.html
States and banks discussing federal fund to help wrongful-foreclosure victims
.BY MARGARET CRONIN FISK
Bloomberg News
The establishment of a general compensation fund for victims of wrongful foreclosure may be part of possible settlements, according to a spokesman for the leader of the 50-state investigation of the foreclosure crisis and mortgage lender practices.
The coordinated inquiry, led by Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, is investigating whether banks and loan servicers used false documents and signatures to justify hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. The investigation, announced Oct. 13, came after JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial’s GMAC mortgage unit said they would stop repossessions in Florida and 22 other states where courts supervise home seizures. Bank of America also froze some of its foreclosure proceedings nationwide.
The Washington Post reported earlier that the states and banks are in talks to establish a fund that would compensate people who lost their homes through faulty foreclosures.
“We are in the very early stages of the discussion and a fund is one of several options,” said Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum. McCollum is participating in the attorneys general inquiry. His office has met with Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, GMAC, PNC Financial Group and Litton Loan Servicing so far in its own investigation.
The attorneys general investigation is on “a fast track” and any resolution might involve multiple settlements, Miller told Bloomberg last week. A global settlement of the task force investigation is unlikely, Miller said. “It would be one bank at a time.”
On Wednesday, Miller spokesman Geoff Greenwood told the Sun Sentinel the fund is “one of the many options being considered.” He added: “There are no details that have been hashed out. Any characterization of it as a done deal is just inaccurate.
“It simply has been raised as part of the discussion.”
Consumer advocates in South Florida are wary, said foreclosure defense attorney Margery Golant. A compensation fund won’t resolve the legal issues, she said, and she has heard “part of the deal [with the attorneys general] is a Congressional proposal to paper over the whole mess.”
Weston foreclosure defense attorney Roy Oppenheim applauded the fund proposal. “The courts cannot handle this problem,” he said. “They are part of the problem.”
At the same time, the Florida Bar is increasing its scrutiny of the foreclosure courts.
An article published Monday in the Florida Bar News said that Bar President Mayanne Downs had written to every chief circuit judge in the state, asking that the organization be copied on any judicial order where it was found attorneys did not act according to Florida Bar rules.
The Bar last month added two new complaint categories to help it better track foreclosure attorney misconduct: foreclosure defense and foreclosure fraud. There already are categories for mortgage fraud, loan modification and advertising loan modification.
The Bar currently has 53 pending cases involving 38 attorneys in regards to foreclosure fraud, and another 12 cases involving four attorneys in regards to foreclosure defense.
Sun Sentinel staff reporters Harriet Johnson Brackey and Diane C. Lade contributed to this report. .
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/18/1931732/states-and-banks-discussing-federal.html#ixzz15fgQYjE7
Dave you need to take the oprah winfrey pledge, lol.
Be careful
just thought i would throw this out
but what might be a simple solution to a complex problem
what if we all went in to court filing the contrct mortgage
as an ab vinito void contract from all the fraud in tila respa
plus all the fraud from there on
if we win we would get all are monies back plus the investor would get all there monies back no contract no investor
we would
n’t have to file bankrupcy and with the money pay our other dept off and save face
plus then the big banks would have a big write down on the overderivitive market
all of the problems would file down the line
no contract no other ( cdo’s, derivitives, mbs, tranches ect you get the picture
i think thats why they are coming forward so we don’t catch on to the ab vinito void contract part this way they get to keep
us off maybe something that could be as simple as voiding the contract
anythoughts sorry im on the road trying to type
dave
Brian
So will stated!
If the fake money supply is 12 times the real existence of money in existence, so are the corresponding ‘debt amounts’, particularly ‘mortgages’.
—-
Ponzis are not fixable, only flushable.
1775.
Comal County Attorney needed. I did a title search and MERS, True Star Mortgage, Flag Star Mortgage and Nation Star Mortgage is all over my Note and Title search.
kds201011@yahoo.com
re; hearings; Notice how they continue to ignore the real issues of the fictitious creation of wealth? The bubble inflated the total capital in the US by a figure that went beyond the total wealth in existence. All of those profits are vapor, and they all belong to the banks that are now trying to get the tax payer to replace what doesn’t really exist. They had to sell each loan 3 or 10 times to actually create the vapor of value that we now know is pure BS. They had to trade them amongst themselves to prevent the truth being told, they had to purchase the government to be able to keep it secret, which the government did by making it a matter of national security.
Prepare yourselves for the unwinding. We are all going to be put through a sausage press. They want to make us all peons for their convenience. They would turn us to food or energy for their machine. Remember what a sociopath or corporation can not feel and only has one goal. To get more.
We find ourselves in a familiar position again. We lack representation and are being taxed and starved by the purpose of our leaders. 1775.
Thx, Brian, I’ll pass that info along to my atty. I found him here on Neil’s list and he’s a God-send. Thank you, Neil, for that list. I’m an active member in another forum and am always referring folks to the link, along with Max Gardner’s BK Bootcamp Grads.
Well stated Neil.
Get so frustrated with the layers of cover-ups.
Senator Kaufman is obviously attuned to the warnings you’ve given us for three long years on this site.
Thank you Senator Kaufman!
It’s now the deadline for EACH of them to pick a side. Ignorance for three years, is no longer an excuse, by governmental employees.
They have the resources right here. Moratoriums while they dig further.
Cancel all $9.5 Trillion in Bank MBS Mortgages for Fraud & Nullity. Yes it was ILLEGAL!!!! Liquidate, not Nationalize the big cheating banks, the private Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure mills ‘assets’, for fraud. Pay the depositors first, give the rest to the cheated pension funds.
America the Free, once again! Let’s start over and build a non-Ponzi, non-inflationary, free, growing real economy.
Leapfrog; Use the AZ BKR court order for custodial records, Judge Curley
Arizona Bankruptcy Court case 2:09-bk-06979-RTBP,
A-man: Yes, doggone it! That’s what I wanted. I figured they would be innundated with suits & want to take the easy way out and deal. I do feel “flattered” though that they sent the big gun after me though and not one of their fresh out of law school employees.
leapfrog what did you think they would roll over and die so easily?
You are an insparation.
Be Strong and Courageous
Mr. Udal, Christine, Mr. Svaldi, and Mr. Bennet (In Bennet’s video he mentions my “boondoggle of a mess”). We truly appreciate you mentioning our mess, we appreciate all that you have tried to do to get Congress to wake up. We just found out yesterday, that in the end we loose our house anyway:( AS long as Corporate America is ABOVE THE LAW and don’t have to follow any that are there to protect us, and Congress won’t punish them! In the end Corporate America knows they can do what ever they want, when ever they want, say what ever they want and NOTHING is going to be done to them!!!! Corporate Greedy America will DESTROY the economy!!! Thanks for mentioning it and or helping us. In the end, we fought for nothing, and we are now to the point where we can no longer fight. We have been beatin down, mentally, emotionally, physically and spirtuality. Please excuse me while I go puke…..It sickens me that Corporate America won and will continue to get away with the thefts of not only our god given rights, our hard earned money,our liveley hoods and our federal tax dollars as well!!
I explain what happened in the updated version of my thoughts, its in the bankruptcy section:(
Thanks for all your support and help. You will never be forgotten
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=172631
What lengths will banks go to to avoid discovery? Good article here. I have a similar situation in my BK case. The heavy hitter is trying to get it dismissed & telling us who owns the note is “none of our business”. The amusing thing is she uses the county recorder’s information as an “exhibit” and “valid proof” that BAC owns the note; yet BAC is listed NOWHERE on the paperwork & no assignments are provided – as those are none of our business either. Haven’t gotten to discovery yet. Should be fun!