Occupy wall Street | Livinglies's Weblog

LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Neil Garfield

“We are still in the death grip of the banks as they attempt to portray themselves as the bulwarks of society even as they continue to rob us of homes, lives, jobs and vitally needed capital which is being channeled into natural resources so that when we commence the gargantuan task of repairing our infrastructure we can no longer afford it and must borrow the money from the thieves who created the gaping hole in our economy threatening the soul of our democracy.” Neil Garfield, livinglies.me

We all know that dozens of people rose to power in Europe and Asia in the 1930’s and 1940’s who turned the world on its head and were responsible for the extermination of tens of millions of people. World War II still haunts us as it projected us into an arms race in which we were the first and only country to kill all the people who lived in two cities in Japan. The losses on both sides of the war were horrendous.
Some of us remember the revelations in 1982 that the United States actively recruited unrepentant Nazi officers and scientists for intelligence and technological advantages in the coming showdown with what was known as the Soviet Union. Amongst the things done for the worst war criminals was safe passage (no prosecution for war crimes) and even new identities created by the United States Department of Justice. Policy was created that diverted richly deserved consequences into rich rewards for knowledge. With WWII in the rear view mirror policy-makers decided to look ahead and prepare for new challenges.

Some of us remember the savings and loans scandals where banks nearly destroyed everything in the U.S. marketplace in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Law enforcement went into high gear, investigated, and pieced together the methods and complex transactions meant to hide the guilt of the main perpetrators in and out of government and the business world. More than 800 people went to jail. Of course, none of the banks had achieved the size that now exists in our financial marketplace.

Increasing the mass of individual financial institutions produced a corresponding capacity for destruction that eclipsed anything imagined by anyone outside of Wall Street. The exponentially increasing threat was ignored as the knowledge of Einstein’s famous equation faded into obscurity. The possibilities for mass destruction of our societies was increasing exponentially as the mass of giant financial service companies grew and the accountability dropped off when they were allowed to incorporate and even sell their shares publicly, replacing a system, hundreds of years old in which partners were ultimately liable for losses they created.

The next generation of world dominators would be able to bring the world to its knees without firing a shot or gassing anyone. Institutions grew as malignancies on steroids and created the illusion of contributing half our gross domestic product while real work, real production and real inventions were constrained to function in a marketplace that had been reduced by 1/3 of its capacity — leaving the banks in control of $7 trillion per year in what was counted as gross domestic product. Our primary output by far was trading paper based upon dubious and fictitious underlying transactions; if those transactions had existed, the share of GDP attributed to financial services would have remained at a constant 16%. Instead it grew to half of GDP. The “paradox” of financial services becoming increasingly powerful and generating more revenues than any other sector while the rest of the economy was stagnating was noted by many, but nothing was done. The truth of this “paradox” is that it was a lie — a grand illusion created by the greatest salesmen on Wall Street.

So even minimum wage lost 1/3 of its value adjusted for inflation while salaries, profits and bonuses were conferred upon people deemed as financial geniuses as a natural consequence of believing the myths promulgated by Wall Street with its control over all forms of information, including information from the government.

But calling out Wall Street would mean admitting that the United States had made a wrong turn with horrendous results. No longer the supreme leader in education, medical care, crime, safety, happiness and most of all prospects for social and economic mobility, the United States had become supreme only through its military strength and the appearance of strength in the world of high finance, its currency being the world’s reserve despite the reality of the ailing economy and widening inequality of wealth and opportunity — the attributes of a banana republic.

All of us remember the great crash of 2008-2009. It was as close as could be imagined to a world wide nuclear attack, resulting in the apparent collapse of economies, tens of millions of people being reduced to poverty, tossed out of their homes, sleeping in cars, divorces, murder, riots, suicide and the loss of millions of jobs on a rising scale (over 700,000 per month when Obama took office) that did not stop rising until 2010 and which has yet to be corrected to figures that economists say would mean that our economy is functioning at proper levels. Month after month more than 700,000 people lost their jobs instead of a net gain of 300,000 jobs. It was a reversal of 1 million jobs per month that could clean out the country and every myth about us in less than a year.

The cause lay with misbehavior of the banks — again. This time the destruction was so wide and so deep that all conditions necessary for the collapse of our society and our government were present. Policy makers, law enforcement and regulators decided that it was better to maintain the illusion of business as usual in a last ditch effort to maintain the fabric of our society even if it meant that guilty people would go free and even be rewarded. It was a decision that was probably correct at the time given the available information, but it was a policy based upon an inaccurate description of the disaster written and produced by the banks themselves. Once the true information was discovered the government made another wrong turn — staying the course when the threat of collapse was over. In a sense it was worse than giving Nazi war criminals asylum because at the time they were protected by the Department of Justice their crimes were complete and there existed little opportunity for them to repeat those crimes. It could be fairly stated that they posed no existing threat to safety of the country. Not so for the banks.

Now as all the theft, deceit and arrogance are revealed, the original premise of the DOJ in granting the immunity from prosecution was based upon fraudulent information from the very people to whom they were granting safe passage. We have lost 5 million homes in foreclosure from their past crimes, but we remain in the midst of the commission of crimes — another 5 million illegal, wrongful foreclosures is continuing to wind its way through the courts.

Not one person has been prosecuted, not one statement has been made acknowledging the crimes, the continuing deceit in sworn filings with regulators, and the continuing drain on the economy and our ability to finance and capitalize on innovation to replace the lost productivity in real goods and services.

We are still in the death grip of the banks as they attempt to portray themselves as the bulwarks of society even as they continue to rob us of homes, lives, jobs and vitally needed capital which is being channeled into natural resources so that when we commence the gargantuan task of repairing our infrastructure we can no longer afford it and must borrow the money from the thieves who created the gaping hole in our economy threatening the soul of our democracy. If the crimes were in the rear view mirror one could argue that the policy makers could make decisions to protect our future. But the crimes are not just in the rear view mirror. More crimes lie ahead with the theft of an equal number of millions of homes based on false and wrongful foreclosures deriving their legitimacy from an illusion of debt — an illusion so artfully created that most people still believe the debts exist. Without a very sophisticated knowledge of exotic finance it seems inconceivable that a homeowner could receive the benefits of a loan and at the same time or shortly thereafter have the debt extinguished by third parties who were paid richly for doing so.

Job creation would be unleashed if we had the courage to stop the continuing fraud. It is time for the government to step forward and call them out, stop the virtual genocide and let the chips fall where they might when the paper giants collapse. It’s complicated, but that is your job. Few people lack the understanding that the bankers behind this mess belong in jail. This includes regulators, law enforcement and even judges. but the “secret” tacit message is not to mess with the status quo until we are sure it won’t topple our whole society and economy.

The time is now. If we leave the bankers alone they are highly likely to cause another crash in both financial instruments and economically by hoarding natural resources until the prices are intolerably high and we all end up pleading for payment terms on basic raw materials for the rebuilding of infrastructure. If we leave them alone another 20 million people will be displaced as more than 5 million foreclosures get processed in the next 3-4 years. If we leave them alone, we are allowing a clear and present danger to the future of our society and the prospects for safety and world peace. Don’t blame Wall Street — they are just doing what they were sent to do — make money. You don’t hold the soldier responsible for firing a bullet when he was ordered to do so. But you do blame the policy makers that him or her there. And you stop them when the policy is threatening another crash.

Stop them now, jail the ones who can be prosecuted, and take apart the large banks. IMF economists and central bankers around the world are looking on in horror at the new order of things hoping that when the United States has exhausted all other options, they will finally do the right thing. (see Winston Churchill quote to that effect).

But forget not that the ultimate power of government is in the hands of the people at large and that the regulators and law enforcement and judges are working for us, on our nickle. Action like Occupy Wall Street is required and you can see the growing nature of that movement in a sweep that is entirely missed by those who arrogantly pull the levers of power now. OWS despite criticism is proving the point — it isn’t new leaders that will get us out of this — it is the withdrawal of consent of the governed one by one without political affiliation or worshiping sound sound biting, hate mongering politicians.

People have asked me why I have not until now endorsed the OWS movement. The reason was that I wanted to give them time to see if they could actually accomplish the counter-intuitive result of exercising power without direct involvement in a corrupt political process. They have proven the point and they are likely to be a major force undermining the demagogues and greedy bankers and businesses who care more about their bottom line than their society that gives them the opportunity to earn that bottom line.

New Fraud Evidence Shows Trillions Of Dollars In Mortgages Have No Owner
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/08/13/2460891/new-fraud-evidence-shows-trillions-of-dollars-in-mortgages-have-no-owner/

Filed under: bubble, CORRUPTION, Eviction, evidence, foreclosure, foreclosure mill, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, GTC | Honor, investment banking, Investor, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Motions, Occupy Movement, Pleading, politics, securities fraud, Servicer, Student Loans, trustee | Tagged: fraud, fraudulent foreclosures, Occupy wall Street, owners of mortgages | 22 Comments »

Banks Traded on Inside Information on Mortgages

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Neil Garfield

Despite the pronouncements by Eric Holder, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, and the obvious reticence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the vast majority of securities attorneys believe that the banks were (a) trading on inside information and (b) committing securities fraud when they funded and then traded on mortgages that were too toxic to ever succeed.

The first, trading on inside information, is regularly prosecuted by the justice department and the SEC. It is why Martha Stewart went to jail in rather flimsy evidence. The catch, justice and the SEC say is that this only applies to securities and the 1998 act signed into law by Clinton makes mortgage bonds and hedges on mortgage bonds NOT securities. It also makes the insurance paid on the mortgage bonds NOT insurance. This is despite the fact that the instruments meet every definition of securities and both the insurance contracts and credit default swaps appear to meet every definition of insurance. But the law passed by Congress in 1998 says otherwise, so how can we prosecute?

The second, securities fraud meets the same obstacle they say because they can’t accuse anyone of committing fraud in the issuance or trading of securities when the law says there were no securities.

So goes the spin coming from Wall Street and as long as law enforcement in each state and the DOJ keeps listening to Wall Street and their lawyers, they will keep arriving at the same mistaken conclusion.

If Wall Street had in fact followed the plan of securitization set forth in their prospectuses and pooling and servicing agreements, assignment and assumption agreements and various other instruments that were created to build the infrastructure of securitization of debt — including but not limited to mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans etc. — then Wall Street would be right and the justice department and the SEC might be stuck in the mud created by the 1998 law. But that isn’t what happened and therefore the premise behind the apparent immunity of Wall Street Banks and bankers is actually an illusion.

Starting with the issuance of the mortgage bonds, most of them were issued before any mortgage was originated or acquired by anyone. In fact, the list attached to the prospectus for the mortgage bonds said so — stating that the spreadsheet or list attached was by example only, that these mortgages do not exist but would be soon be replaced with real mortgages acquired pursuant to the enabling documents for the creation of the REMIC “trust.” But that is not what happened either.

In no way did the Banks follow the terms of the prospectus, PSA, assignment and assumption agreements or anything else. Instead what they really did was create the illusion of a securitization scheme that covered up the reality of a PONZI scheme, the hallmark of which is that it collapses when investors stop buying the bogus securities and more investors want their money out than those wishing to put money into the scheme. There was no reason for the entire system to collapse other than the fact that Wall Street planned and bet on the collapse, thus making money coming and going and draining the lifeblood of capital worldwide out of economies and marketplaces that depended upon the continued flow of capital.

The creation of the REMIC “trust” was a sham. It was never formalized, never funded and never acquired any mortgages. hence any “exempt” securities issued by it were not the kind intended by the Act signed into law in 1998. It was not a mortgage-backed security, or credit backed security, it was an illusion designed to defraud anyone who invested in them. The purpose of issuing the mortgage bonds was not to fund and acquire mortgages but rather to steal as much money out of the flow as possible while covering their tracks with some of the money ending up on the closing table for newly originated or previously originated bundles of mortgages that were to be acquired. That isn’t what happened either.

Wall Street bankers put the money from investors into their own private piggy bank and then funded and acquired mortgages with only part of the money while they made false “proprietary trades” in the “mortgage bonds” that made it look like they were trading geniuses making money hand over fist while the rest of the world saw their wealth decline by as much as 60%-70%. The funding for debt came not from the unfunded REMIC “trusts” but from the investment banker who was merely an intermediary depository institution which unlawfully was playing with investor money. The actual instruments upon which Wall Street relies to justify its actions is the prospectus, the PSA, and the Master Servicing agreement — each of which was used to sell the investors on letting go of their money in exchange for the promises and conditions contained in the exotic agreements containing numerous conflicting clauses.

Thus the conclusion is that since the mortgage bonds were issued by an unfunded and probably nonexistent entity, the investors had “bought” an interest in an incoherent series of agreements that together constituted a security or, in the alternative, that there was no security and the investors were simply duped into parting with their money which is fraud, pure and simple.

I would say that investors acquired certain passive rights to the instruments used, with the exception of the bogus mortgage bonds that were usually worthless pieces of paper or entries on a log. In my opinion the issuance of the prospectus was the issuance of a security. The issuance of the PSA was the issuance of a security, And the issuance of the other agreements in the illusory securitization chain may also have been the issuance of a security. If cows can be securities, then written instruments that were used to secure passive investments are certainly securities. The exemption for mortgage bonds doesn’t apply because neither the mortgage bond nor the REMIC “trust” were ever funded or used — except in furtherance of their fraud when they claimed losses due to mortgage defaults and obtained federal bailouts, insurance and proceeds of credit default swaps.

The loan closings, like the funding of the “investments” was similarly diverted away from the investor and toward the intermediaries so that they could trade on the appearance of ownership of the loans in the form of selling bundles of loans that were not even close to being properly described in the paperwork — although the paperwork often looked as though it was all proper.

The trading, hedging and insuring of investments that were not only destined by actually planned to fail was trading on inside information. The Banks knew very well that the triple A rating of the mortgage bonds was a sham because the mortgage bonds were worthless. What they were really trading in was the ownership of the loans which they knew were falsely represented on the note and mortgage. They thus converted the issuance of the promissory note signed by the borrower into a security under flase pretenses because the payee on the note and the secured party on the mortgage never completed the transaction, to wit: they never funded the loan and they made sure that the terms of repayment on the promissory note did not match up with the terms of repayment set forth in the prospectus, which was the real security.

Knowing from the start that they had the power (through the powers conferred on the Master Servicer) to pull the rug out from under the “investments” they traded with a vengeance hedging and selling as many times as they could based upon the same alleged loans that were in fact funded directly by and therefor owned by the investors directly (because the REMIC was ignored and so was the source of funding at the alleged loan closing).

Being the sole source of the real information on the legality, quality and quantity of these nonexistent investments in mortgage bonds, the Wall Street banks, their management, and their affiliates were committing both violation of the insider trading rule and the securities fraud rule ( as well as various other common law and statutory prohibitions and crimes relating to deceptive practices in the sale of securities). By definition and applying the facts rather than the spin, the Banks a have committed numerous crimes and the bankers should be held accountable. Let’s not forget that by this time in the S&L scandal more than 800 people were sent to jail despite various attempts to mitigate the severity of their trespass and trampling on the rights of investors and depositors.

Failure to prosecute, while the statute of limitations is running out, is taking the rule of law and turning it on its head. The Obama administration has an obligation to hold these people accountable not only because violations of law should be prosecuted but to provide some deterrence from a recurrence or even escalation of the illegal practices foisted upon institutions, taxpayers and consumers around the world. Ample evidence exists that the Banks, emboldened by the lack of prosecutions, have re-started their engines and are indeed in the process of doing it again.

Think about it, where would a company get the money to have a multimedia advertising campaign blanketing areas of the the Country when the return on investment, according to them is only 2.5%? Between marketing, advertising, processing, and administrative costs, pus a reserve for defaults, they are either running a going out of business strategy or there is something else at work.

And if the transactions were legitimate why do the numbers of foreclosures drop like stones in those states that require proof of payment, proof of loss, and proof of ownership? why have we not seen a single canceled check or wire transfer receipt that corroborates the spin from Wall Street? Where is the real money in this scheme?

James Surowiecki: Why Is Insider Trading on the Rise?
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/06/10/130610ta_talk_surowiecki

FROM OTHER MEDIA SOURCES —-

Foreclosure Victims Protesting Wall Street Impunity Outside DOJ Arrested, Tasered
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16527-victims-of-foreclosure-arrested-tasered-protesting-wall-street-impunity-outside-doj

Watch out. The mortgage securities market is at it again.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/23/news/economy/mortgage-backed-securities.pr.fortune/

Wall Street Lobbyists Literally Writing Bills In Congress
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/05/27/wall-street-lobbyists-literally-writing-bills-in-congress/

Time to Put the Heat on the Fed and FDIC to Fix Lousy Governance at TBTF Banks
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/05/so-if-shareholders-wont-rein-in-jamie-dimon-time-to-put-the-heat-on-the-fed-and-fdic.html

West Sacramento homeowner uses new state law to stop foreclosure
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/23/5441875/west-sacramento-homeowner-uses.html

The Foreclosure Fraud Prevention Act: A.G. Schneiderman Commends Assembly for Passing Foreclosure Relief Bills
http://4closurefraud.org/2013/05/23/the-foreclosure-fraud-prevention-act-a-g-schneiderman-commends-assembly-for-passing-foreclosure-relief-bills/

Where did the California foreclosures go? Level of foreclosures sales dramatically down. Foreclosure legislation and bank processing. Subsidizing investor purchases via HAFA.
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/california-foreclosure-process-hafa-program-subsidize-investor-purchases/

Wasted wealth – The ongoing foreclosure crisis that never had to happen – The Hill’s Congress Blog
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/301415-wasted-wealth–the-ongoing-foreclosure-crisis-that-never-had-to-happen

Oregon Foreclosure Avoidance Program gets tuneup
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/05/oregon_foreclosure_avoidance_p.html

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, foreclosure, GARFIELD GWALTNEY KELLEY AND WHITE, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: Assignment and ASsumption Agreement, common law fraud, insider trading, Master Servicer, mortgage bonds, Occupy wall Street, Pooling and Servicing Agreement, Prospectus, securities fraud, underwriting bank, Wall Street | 103 Comments »

Sitting on a Powder Keg: Riots and Demonstrations Worldwide

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Neil Garfield

With the addition of Sweden to those countries rocked by and surprised by rioting over economic conditions and inequality, the day of reckoning for the banks and the governments controlled by the banks is nearing. As we saw in the Arab Spring and other social phenomena when passions reach critical mass, things change — and not always for the best, at least not at first.

History shows us that when inequality and social welfare are at their worst, as perceived by the public, a significant minority rises up, changes government and takes their revenge on the wicked and innocent alike. Our own revolution was a minority movement that achieved critical mass with very few people leading to the charge or even attending meetings.

Sweden, a country that prides itself on social justice, was hit yesterday by the fury of rioting citizens. And the Occupy Movement demonstration yesterday resulted in 17 arrests and Taser of at least one demonstrator. Anyone who believes that this will blow over without consequences is mistaken. The underlying problems of inequality were not the result of a business cycle: they were the result of criminal behavior of bankers colluding to take wealth, property and income away from virtually everyone.

The manipulation of LIBOR and the indexes that feed into LIBOR is an example of the arrogance of bankers who seem to know they won’t go to jail and probably will suffer no penalty whatsoever. Meanwhile the loans tied to changes in LIBOR as published by the Wall Street Journal had changes in interest rates dictated not by market forces by by the brute force of arrogant bankers whose religion is money.

The mortgage situation all over the world is what is causing the economies around the world to bleed. It was caused by bankers who cornered the market on money thus acting against free market forces which they pretend to like so much. They created an unprecedented storm by raising asset prices artificially, betting that the prices would come down to normal levels and defrauding pension funds and other investors plus defrauding homeowners, consumers, and tax-paying citizens. In the end they have the money and property and everyone else suffers. This fact is not lost on the public.

If we want to avoid the same fate as dozens of other countries around the world in turmoil we must return to being a nation of laws. It is in the public domain now that the banks have illegally foreclosed on millions of homeowners. Not only have they not gone to jail for mortgage fraud, wire fraud, RICO and other criminal actions, they have been rewarded with both more money and weakening of regulations that might prevent them from doing it again — if we ever get out of this mess.

The right thing to do when the wrong thing was done, is to make it right. If someone was foreclosed upon illegally they should get their house back or bargain for a dollar settlement that takes into account economic loss and the indignities of damage to lifestyle and reputation. As things stand now, this remedy is slipping away — and yet it is the only right thing to do. Millions of people in this country and Europe are falling into poverty, which means they don’t have the resources to put food on the table or a roof over their heads. To add insult to injury when tragedy strikes in places like Moore, Oklahoma the insurance companies are paying the banks that have no loss whatsoever.

I counsel people to avoid violence and to never disobey a direct instruction from anyone in law enforcement. It will only make matters worse. But I can tell from people who contact me and the mainstream news stories that people have no respect left for a legal system that does not respect the right of people and favors corporations and institutions even if they have obviously committed crimes against humanity, the state and millions of individual citizens. We have seen violence before and nobody liked it. I think it might be coming to our shores with a vengeance.

We can save ourselves the trouble if we break up the mega banks, break their hold on government and reduce them to the status of utilities regulated carefully so that they don’t run away with transactions conducted by their customers — which is exactly what happened in the continuing mortgage meltdown. Occupy is right, Elizabeth Warren is right, and even the rioters are right (even if we disagree with their methods).

Sweden’s capital hit by worst riots in years
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/05/22/uk-sweden-riots-idUKBRE94L0C720130522

Millions falling into poverty in recession-racked Italy: report
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/22/us-italy-economy-poverty-idUSBRE94L0AX20130522

Peaceful Foreclosure Protester Tased At Department of Justice
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/peaceful-foreclosure-protester-tased-

How Foreclosure Undermined Black and Brown Wealth
http://www.theroot.com/buzz/how-foreclosure-undermined-black-and-brown-wealth

Warren asks feds: Why no cases against bankers?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57584642/warren-asks-feds-why-no-cases-against-bankers/

Elizabeth Warren Asks New Treasury Secretary If He’ll Be As Bad On Big Banks As The Old One (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/elizabeth-warren-jack-lew_n_3315005.html

Banks Win Big as Regulators Refuse to Rein in $700 Trillion Derivatives Market
http://www.truth-out.org/video/item/16500-banks-win-big-as-regulators-refuse-to-rein-in-700-trillion-derivatives-market

Filed under: CDO, CORRUPTION, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: Arab Spring, Elizabeth Warren, insurance, Italy, Libor, MOORE, Occupy wall Street, Oklahoma, Sweden, violence, wealth inequality | 16 Comments »

Politics Diverting Us From the Real Issues

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Neil Garfield

“The bottom line is that conservatives don’t conserve anything. They have their hand deeper into the public purse than anyone else. Liberals don’t liberate anyone either, providing the tools to prospects for progress and prosperity. The terms should not be used because nobody means what they say.” Neil F Garfield livinglies.me

Editor’s Comment: Romney’s latest gaffe is only a mistake in terms of him having said it, not that that he didn’t mean it. To set the record straight the 47% pay payroll taxes that the rich don’t pay, have incomes under $50,000 per year, and one third of them are seniors and disabled with incomes lower than $20,000 per year getting Social Security and similar benefits that they paid for when they were working. But isn’t really the problem.

The problem is that what Romney gave voice to was a feeling amongst the elite Democrats and Republicans who look at the bottom economic half of the country with disdain. Although they are working, paying Social Security and Unemployment taxes most of these people are treated as though they are trash to be taken out and cleaned somehow. Those taxes amount to over 12% of their income whereas the income from wealth, escape those taxes altogether.

And THAT is the reason it is so easy for banks to manipulate politicians, law enforcement and regulators into doing nothing about the cancer growing on our society — fake mortgages, fake foreclosures, fake evictions, and fake income and assets reported for the banks. Some of the media are picking up on the fact that the stolen money from investors is not being recognized as taxable income, which it is, and that the IRS isn’t pursuing hundreds of billions of income taxes that are due from the Banks. Talk about getting a free ride.

Today’s conference call (7 PM EDT) with members will touch on this along with the usual report on what is getting traction and what tactics and strategies might be used to confront the banks who are faking ownership of the loans when they neither loaned the money nor purchased the loan with money.

My take on the political landscape is this: I speak with people from the so-called far right political spectrum to the far left political spectrum. I speak to members of fringe groups too.

The overwhelming consensus amongst all of them from one end to the other is that government is corrupt, banks are corrupt and that our society is in the wrong hands mostly without candidates who will speak to these issues. We need a new crop of politicians who are no so encumbered with loyalties to the bank oligopoly because at some time, the ticking time bomb is going to blow. I speak of economic meltdown, caused by fabricated transactions and assets that our counted as part of our national wealth and GDP.

If you ask people specific questions about what is fair, just, moral, ethical and legal nearly all of them respond with the same answers. So why are we a divided nation? Why to we listen to sound bites instead of forcing the candidates to speak to us about our issues, about our stress and anxiety — whether we will have a roof over our heads, whether we will have food on the table, whether our children will be educated well enough so that they can fill the jobs that are ready to be filled. Right now there are 3 million such jobs.

You would think that someone would want to do something about it. Obama tried to put through a bill to do something about that but he didn’t push hard enough. Republicans scoffed at it because of their allegiance to the super rich whose boatloads of money are floating nearly all the republicans and many of the democrats in local, state and Federal elections.

But we can’t blame one or even a group of politicians if we, the Boss, as the voters who control who governs us, don’t do our job and get educated about issues, educated about candidates and exercise our absolute right to vote in the elections.

The current crop of incumbents doesn’t worry about our reaction because we don’t have any reaction tot heir stupid policies, bills and laws. We are a nation of apathy where vote turnout has been going lower and lower. The reason is the same as the unemployment situation. The figures would be worse if we added those back who simply gave up. Don’t give up your vote. Use it and mean it!

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: business, climate, conservatives, Democrats, economy, government, liberals, Obama, Occupy wall Street, POLITICS, Republicans, Romney | 21 Comments »

TBTF Banks Bigger than Ever — How is that possible in a recession?

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT

CUSTOMER SERVICE 520-405-1688

Editor’s Comment:

The pernicious effect of the banks and the difficulty of regulating them across transnational and state borders has led to a growing nightmare that history will repeat itself sooner than later.

This is to rocket science — it is recognition. We have median income still declining in what is still by most measures a recession that is about to get worse. Yet the largest banks are reporting record profits. What that means is that Wall Street is making more money “trading paper” than the rest of the country is making doing actual commerce — i.,e. the making and selling of goods of services.

This is another inversion of common sense. But it is explainable. 4 years ago I predicted that as the recession depressed the earnings of most companies the banks would nonetheless show increased profits. The reason was simply that using Bermuda, Bahamas, Cayman Islands the banks siphoned off most of the credit market liquidity through the tier 2 yield spread premium. The tier 2 YSP was really the money the banks made by selling crappy loans as good loans from aggregators to the investors — and then failed to document any part of the real transactions where money exchanged hands. In some case the YSP “trading profit” exceed the amount of the loan.

So now they are able to feed those “trading profits” back into their system a little at a time reporting ever increasing profits while the the real world goes to hell. So tell, me, what is it going to take to get you to to go to the streets, write the letters and demand that justice be done and allow, for the first time, investors and borrowers to get together and reach settlements in lieu of foreclosures? Don’t you see that whether you are rich or poor, renting or owning, that all of this is going to bring down your wealth and buying power. The Federal Reserve has already tripled the U.S. Currency money supply giving all the benefit to the TBTF banks. It seems to me that as group the American citizens are far more too big to fail than any industry or company.

Evil prospers when good people do nothing.

Big Five Banks larger than before crisis, bailout

WASHINGTON —

Two years after President Barack Obama vowed to eliminate the danger of financial institutions becoming “too big to fail,” the nation’s largest banks are bigger than they were before the credit crisis.

Five banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs — held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, according to the Federal Reserve.

Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy, sparking concern that trouble at a major bank would rock the financial system and force the government to step in as it did during the 2008 crunch.

“Market participants believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact,” said Gary Stern, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

That specter is eroding faith in Obama’s pledge that taxpayer-funded bailouts are a thing of the past. It also is exposing him to criticism from Federal Reserve officials, Republicans and Occupy Wall Street supporters, who see the concentration of bank power as a threat to economic stability.

As weaker firms collapsed or were acquired, a handful of financial giants emerged from the crisis and have thrived. Since then, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo have continued to swell, if less dramatically, thanks to internal growth and acquisitions from European banks shedding assets amid the euro crisis.

The industry’s evolution defies the president’s January 2010 call to “prevent the further consolidation of our financial system.” Embracing new limits on banks’ trading operations, Obama said then that taxpayers wouldn’t be well “served by a financial system that comprises just a few massive firms.”

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, blames a “lack of leadership at Treasury and the White House” for the failure to fulfill that promise. “It’d be safer to break them up,” he said.

The Obama administration rejects the criticism, citing new safeguards to head off further turmoil in the banking system. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the U.S. “financial system is significantly stronger than it was before the crisis.” He credits a flurry of new regulations, including tougher capital and liquidity requirements that limit risk-taking by the biggest banks, authority to take over failing big institutions, and prohibitions on the largest banks acquiring competitors.

The government’s financial system rescue, beginning with the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, angered millions of taxpayers and helped give rise to the tea-party movement. Banks and bailouts remain unpopular: By a margin of 52 to 39 percent, respondents in a February Pew Research Center poll called the bailouts “wrong” and 68 percent said banks have a mostly negative effect on the country.

The banks say they have increased their capital backstops in response to regulators’ demands, making them better able to ride out unexpected turbulence. JPMorgan, whose chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, this month acknowledged public “hostility” toward bankers, boasts of a “fortress balance sheet.” Bank of America, which was about 50 percent larger at the end of 2011 than five years earlier, says it has boosted capital and liquidity while increasing to 29 months the amount of time the bank could operate without external funding.

“We’re a much stronger company than we were heading into the crisis,” said Jerry Dubrowski, a Bank of America spokesman. The bank, based in Charlotte, says it plans to shrink by year-end to $1.75 trillion in risk-weighted assets, a measure regulators use to calculate how much capital individual banks must hold.

Still, the banking industry has become increasingly concentrated since the 1980s. Today’s 6,291 commercial banks are less than half the number that existed in 1984, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The trend intensified during the crisis as JPMorgan acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual; Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch; and Wells Fargo took over Wachovia in deals encouraged by the government.

“One of the bad outcomes, the adverse outcomes of the crisis, was the mergers that were of necessity undertaken when large banks were at-risk,” said Donald Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006-2010. “Some of the biggest banks got a lot bigger, and the market got more concentrated.”

In recent weeks, at least four current Fed presidents — Esther George of Kansas City, Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, Jeffrey Lacker of Richmond and Richard Fisher of Dallas — have voiced similar worries about the risk of a renewed crisis.

The annual report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas was devoted to an essay by Harvey Rosenblum, head of the bank’s research department, “Why We Must End Too Big to Fail — Now.”

A 40-year Fed veteran, Rosenblum wrote in the report released last month: “TBTF institutions were at the center of the financial crisis and the sluggish recovery that followed. If allowed to remain unchecked, these entities will continue posing a clear and present danger to the U.S. economy.”

The alarms come almost two years after Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation act. The law required the largest banks to draft contingency plans or “living wills” detailing how they would be unwound in a crisis. It also created a financial-stability council headed by the Treasury secretary, charged with monitoring the system for excessive risk-taking.

The new protections represent an effort to avoid a repeat of the crisis and subsequent recession in which almost 9 million workers lost their jobs and the U.S. government committed $245 billion to save the financial system from collapse.

The goal of policy makers is to ensure that if one of the largest financial institutions fails in the next crisis, shareholders and creditors will pay the tab, not taxpayers.

“Two or three years from now, Goldman Sachs should be like MF Global,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of the nonprofit group Better Markets, who doubts the government would allow a company such as Goldman to repeat MF Global’s Oct. 31 collapse.

Dodd-Frank, the most comprehensive rewriting of financial regulation since the 1930s, subjected the largest banks to higher capital requirements and closer scrutiny. The law also barred federal officials from providing specific types of assistance that were used to prevent such firms from failing in 2008. Instead, the Fed will work with the FDIC to put major banks and other large institutions through the equivalent of bankruptcy.

“If a large financial institution should ever fail, this reform gives us the ability to wind it down without endangering the broader economy,” Obama said before signing the act on July 21, 2010. “And there will be new rules to make clear that no firm is somehow protected because it is too big to fail.”

Officials at the Treasury Department, the Fed and other agencies have spent the past two years drafting detailed regulations to make that vision a reality.

Yet the big banks stayed big or, in some cases, grew larger. JPMorgan, which held $2 trillion in total assets when Dodd-Frank was signed, reached $2.3 trillion by the end of 2011, according to Federal Reserve data.

For Lacker, the banks’ living wills are the key to placing the financial system on sounder footing. Done right, they may require institutions to restructure to make their orderly resolution during a crisis easier to accomplish, he said.

Neil Barofsky, Treasury’s former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, calls the idea of winding down institutions with more than $2 trillion in assets “completely unrealistic.”

It’s likely that more than one bank would face potential failure during any crisis, he said, which would further complicate efforts to gracefully collapse a giant bank. “We’ve made almost no progress on ending too big to fail,” he said.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: Bank of America, Bear Sterns, borrower, Dodd-Frank, FDIC, Federal reserve, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, Goldman Sachs, housing market, International Monetary Fund, Jamie Dimon, Jerry Dubrowksi, JPMorgan, Lender Liability, Mortgage, mortgage aggregator, mortgage fruad, mortgages, Occupy wall Street, predatory lending, TBTF, tier 2 YSP, Timothy Geithner, too big to fail, trading paper, Troubled Asset Relief Program, Wells Fargo | 13 Comments »

Black Clergy Backing Occupy the Dream Movement

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT

EDITOR’S COMMENT: While it’s good to see more people involved and also good to see them encouraging transfer money out of the big banks, dilution of the message is frustrating. Perhaps the organizers can rally to get things focused on point… or perhaps this is just the first step, to get people out and then get them all pointed in the same direction.

While the politicians and pundits continue to rant about the lack of a clear message of the Occupy movement, the people seem to get the message just fine — income and wealth inequality driven by government laws and policies that favor those who can’t afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists.

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/moving_america_news/36274/1

Black Clergy Backing Occupy the Dream Movement

Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 6:51 am
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

….. The infusion of support from the black community for the Bay Area Occupy movement is considered critical to keeping it alive.

Rev. Kenneth F. Irby addressed the Occupy Movement.

Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” recently addressed the Occupy movement’s lack of poor and people of color in its leadership ranks. In a “report” by one of its correspondents, the show tackled what has become a legitimate issue among the Occupy Wall Street group: That the movement itself has become divided by classism and elitism in its leadership ranks.

The piece said the encampment had been split into “uptown” – led by college-educated white males who have Internet access and meet in the foyer of a Deutsche Bank office building to discuss strategy – while the “others” lived in the “downtown” part of the encampment and were judged to have little interest in setting an agenda and little ability to execute a strategy, even if they had the ideas.

As in most satirical pieces, there is a ring of truth in “The Daily Show’s” observations. One element is that black people have no interest in the Occupy movement, for a whole host of reasons, ranging from “been there, done that all our lives” to the suggestion that black people are too busy struggling to survive to have the “luxury” to take off and demonstrate with a bunch of people who don’t have the interest of black folks in mind anyway.

But it appears all that is about to change.

Previously, several high-profile African-Americans participated in the movement. Scholar Cornel West, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and former NAACP leader Benjamin Chavis visited Occupy encampments and discussed the need to ensure that issues of importance to black Americans were addressed.

Sunday, two dozen prominent black pastors in the San Francisco Bay area amped up the call for participation by launching Occupy the Dream.

The day was marked by a demonstration at the Federal Reserve Bank branch in San Francisco to highlight the growing inequity between rich and poor in the United States.

Occupy Oakland activists have demonstrated at foreclosed properties and have protested at local banks, and many African-Americans have participated in the demonstrations.

But the Rev. Harold Mayberry, pastor of the 2,800-member First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oakland, said the movement was missing an essential element.

According to the SanFranciscoGate.com (SFGate.com), Mayberry told his congregation that Occupy Wall Street “had the right ideas, but it was without structure. People ask, ‘Why the church?’ No social movement in this country has succeeded without the involvement of the faith community.”

Referring to Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in 1955, “The original Occupy the Dream movement began right there,” Mayberry said. “In a movement, there is no place for wimps.”

“I have addressed the Occupy Movement and its Arab spring origin with my congregation both in Bible Study and from the pulpit,” the Rev. Kenneth F. Irby, senior pastor of Turner Chapel-AME Church in Palmetto, Florida.

“I am more interested in educating them for awareness purposes and not advocating that they actually participate in any particular secular endeavor,” Irby told BlackAmericaWeb.com on Monday. “I am encouraging them to first allow the Holy Spirit to occupy their lives, and then be led by the same Holy Spirit to occupy the needs of the hurting, homeless and hungry in our church, community and country.

“As we celebrate Dr. King’s dream today, on yesterday, I asked everyone that would listen to not use this day a holiday of comfort and convenience but rather to intentionally act as an agent of peace and compassion in this time of challenge and controversy,” said Irby.

Nationally, Occupy the Dream is seeking a moratorium on home foreclosures and billions of dollars for a fund that would create jobs and provide training. …..

“This is a great leap forward to involve local pastors,” James Taylor, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Francisco and an expert in African American studies, told SFGate.com. “The general critique of Occupy is that it has lacked a specific agenda. But this could be a sign of maturity for the movement.”

Next month, the pastors will ask their congregants to withdraw a small amount of money – at least $30 – from their bank accounts and deposit it in either a credit union or a minority-owned bank.

The website reported that if that symbolic move doesn’t generate movement among bankers, Occupy the Dream would ask larger African-American-dominated institutions, churches and black professionals to begin transferring greater amounts to credit unions.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Occupy wall Street, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 11 Comments »

Fed President: Survival of the Fattest?

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT

EDITOR’S COMMENT: Apparently even some of the Federal Reserve Presidents see the writing on the wall. But with the NY FED having people like Jamie Dimon on the Board, you can hardly expect any action that wouldn’t be strictly for the banks, the public be damned. His point is simple: if we give in to the Banks we are submitting to a different, lower source of authority than that offered by our own Constitution. What we have is a game-changer. The bigger you get, regardless of how you achieved your size, the more government will give out outright in money and protection.

Slowly it appears there are some whose common sense and desire for a real solution to this crisis are making headway. Their questions are being heard. Their solutions are being discussed. And both are being repeated with increasing volume.

Perhaps legislators and regulators are waking up to the fact that they and their families are not immune from the ravages of this disaster. Perhaps those in elected positions are realizing that the only way to stay there, is to side with their constituents against the behemoth pretender lender banks. Perhaps those in appointed positions are realizing that the polls say 85% of people in this country think we’re going in the wrong direction, that 54% say that Obama should not be reelected and that Congress has a 7% approval rating.

Polls also say that the overwhelming majority of Americans support the Occupy Movement, support getting those in office out of office and support anything to get money out of politics. The “take-away” message in all this? Anyone holding any office, elected or otherwise, better hold on tight because unless they can show that they’re running against the behemoth pretender lender banks and against the status quo and that We the People believe them, they won’t be in office very long.

The Fattest or the Fittest?

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

SEE ARTICLE — FED PRESIDENT WANTS TO BREAK UP BANKS

ELIMINATING the benefits reaped by institutions that are too politically powerful and interconnected to fail has been an elusive goal in the aftermath of the credit crisis. Institutions most likely to receive assistance from the federal government if they become troubled — behemoths like Citigroup, Bank of America or Wells Fargo — have grown only larger in recent years. Efforts to pare down these banks have met well-financed resistance among policy makers.

Happily, though, reducing the perils of gargantuan institutions — and the threat to taxpayers — is an idea that seems to be taking hold in Washington. To be sure, the army arguing for change is far outgunned by the battalions of bankers and lobbyists working to maintain the status quo. But some combatants seeking reform believe they are making headway.

Richard W. Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is one. In a speech last month he described, quite colorfully, the problems of these unwieldy institutions and the regulatory ethic “that coddles survival of the fattest rather than promoting survival of the fittest.” Bank regulators should follow the lead of the health authorities battling obesity rates among our population, he said, adding that he favored “an international accord that would break up these institutions into more manageable size.”

This is a banker talking, not a member of the Occupy Wall Street drum circle.

And yet, some have criticized Mr. Fisher for voicing these sensible views — a sign to him that the issue is gaining traction. In an interview last week, he said: “Judging from the anguished calls I received from lobbyists for the megabanks, the ‘attaboy’ calls I am getting from regional and community bankers and the requests for copies of the speech from senators on both sides of the aisle, it appears this is a hot topic.”

That Mr. Fisher has received encouragement from both conservatives and liberals on his views leads him to conclude that “this is an issue that can transcend bipartisan politics.”

Last week, Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who leads the Senate Banking subcommittee on financial institutions and consumer protection, held a hearing on how to shield Main Street from what he calls megabank risk. In April 2010, he was a co-sponsor of the Safe Banking Act of 2010 with Ted Kaufman, the former Democratic senator from Delaware. The bill, which would break up some of the largest banks by requiring caps on institution size and leverage, ran into a buzz saw of opposition from the usual suspects.

But Mr. Brown soldiers on; he said in an interview on Thursday that he, too, believes the debate is changing. “We’re seeing sentiment grow on the Brown-Kaufman idea,” he said. “We are seeing some people who are pretty conservative here understanding the implicit subsidies these megabanks receive. Our goal is that senators understand this to the point of wanting to take action.”

He said he hoped his hearing would educate colleagues on the significant financial bounties received by big banks that are not allowed to fail, especially their lower borrowing costs — a result of investor belief that taxpayers will rescue them. This places these banks at an unfair advantage over their smaller competitors.

“Why should the Bank of America enjoy an advantage the Peoples Bank in Coldwater, Ohio, doesn’t get?” Mr. Brown asked. “The government’s got to pull away from this and level the playing field.”

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, Federal reserve, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Occupy wall Street, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 10 Comments »

OCCUPY MOVEMENT GETS MORE INVOLVED IN SPECIFICS

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT

EDITOR’S COMMENT: The Occupy movement is taking on a life of its own, expressing citizen outrage over the behavior of the banks and the complicity of the government in aiding and abetting the stealing of homes. As the movement matures, it is getting increasingly focussed on the weak spots of the Banks and it is having a political effect as well as a judicial effect. Judges are having conferences that differ substantially from the ones they had only 6 months ago.

Judges still want to move their calendar along. And the issue of “finality” still looms large for them — someone has to say “game over.” But they are expressing doubt and dismay as more and more cases show up where it is obvious that the Banks are playing fast and loose with the rules of evidence and more importantly, violating criminal statutes to get a house in which they have no economic interest.

I say we should give the Occupy movement as much support as possible and that we should encourage Occupy leaders to take whatever political action they can to turn the course of the country from becoming a third world nation. The failure of the judicial system and the failure of law enforcement to lead the way on this, as they did when we had the savings loan scandal in the 1980’s is a sure sign that our system is broken and we know who broke it — the Banks.

If we succeed, then we will have reversed control over the government to the people, and reverted to the rule of law required by our Constitution. For those who depend upon the Bill of Rights for their existence, like the NRA (which depends upon the second amendment) they should be aware that acceptance of the status quo means that government can and will take any action it wants ignoring the Constitutional protections that were guaranteed. First, they take your house, then your guns.

Occupy Protests Spread Anti-Foreclosure Message During National ‘Occupy Our Homes’ Action

WASHINGTON — In the late evening on Tuesday, Brigitte Walker welcomed Occupy Atlanta onto her property in an effort to save her Riverdale, Ga., home from foreclosure.

Walker, 44, joined the Army in 1985 and had been among the first U.S. personnel to enter Iraq in February 2003. “I wasn’t happy about it,” she told The Huffington Post early Tuesday afternoon, speaking of her deployment. “But it’s my call of duty so had to do what I was supposed to do. It was a very difficult duty. It was a very emotional duty.”

Walker saw fellow soldiers die, get injured. She saw a civilian with them get killed. “It was very nerve-wracking,” she said. “It makes you wonder if you’re going to survive.”

She was in Iraq until May 2004, when the shock from mortar rounds crushed her spine. Doctors had to put in titanium plates to reinforce her spine, which had nerve damage. Today her range of motion is limited, and she still experiences a lot of pain. She still struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. Loud noises and big crowds are painful. The Fourth of July is difficult for her

She settled in Riverdale, a town outside of Atlanta, after purchasing a house in 2004 for $139,000. She has a brother who lives in the area and enjoyed it when she would visit him. “It seemed peaceful and quiet,” she said. “That’s what I needed.” Her active duty salary covered the mortgage.

But in 2007, the Army medically retired Walker against her wishes. “I thought I was going to rehab and come back,” she said. “But they told me I couldn’t stay in.” Walker now has to rely on a disability check.

After retiring from the Army, Walker used up her savings, and then got rid of a car to help pay her monthly mortgage payment. “I didn’t have problems until they put me out of the military,” she said. “It was just overwhelming.”

By April of last year, she was starting to fall behind on her mortgage. JPMorgan Chase — which owns Walker’s mortgage, according to an Occupy Atlanta press release — has since begun foreclosure proceedings. She said the bank is set to take her house on January 3.

“Nobody is willing to help me,” Walker said. “Where are the programs to help vets like me? I know I’m one of many.”

Enter Occupy Atlanta.

“I’m very hopeful that it will help me save my home and allow Chase to give me a chance to keep my home,” Walker said, speaking of the Occupiers. She added that she’s willing to celebrate Christmas with the activists.

“I guess,” she said with a laugh. “As long as it takes.”

Hours before Occupy Atlanta joined Walker at her home, the activists organized protests aimed at disrupting home auctions at three area courthouses. At a Fulton County Courthouse, civil rights leader Dr. Joseph Lowery joined 200 demonstrators at the county’s monthly foreclosure auction.

Across the country, activists associated with the Occupy movement and Occupy Our Homes reached out to families threatened by foreclosure and highlighted the crisis with marches, rallies and press conferences.

“Occupy Wall Street started because of a deep need in our country to address the financial and economic crisis that’s been created by the consolidation of wealth and political power in our country,” said Jonathan Smucker, 33, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York. “The foreclosure crisis, at least as much as anything else, illustrates the deep moral crisis that we are facing. It illustrates what you have when you have your whole political system serving the needs of the one percent.”

Mothers spoke out on front lawns. In New York City, Occupy Wall Street marched through the streets of East New York. At the same time, Occupy groups were protesting home auctions in Nevada and New Orleans. In Seattle protesters tried to save a family from eviction. In all, activists took over vacant homes or homes facing foreclosures from being evicted in 20 cities.

During the actions, the activists tried to keep the mood light. In Chicago they planned a house-warming party for a family moving into an abandoned home. To announce their presence in New York, protestes held a block party and, in a play on police tape, wrapped a home in yellow tape bearing the word “Occupy.”

As the protest were taking place, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, released a new report that found an increasing number of American homes are going unused, a spike attributed to high foreclosure and unemployment rates.

“According to Census Bureau data, nonseasonal vacant properties have increased 51 percent nationally from nearly 7 million in 2000 to 10 million in April 2010, with 10 states seeing increases of 70 percent or more,” the report read. “High foreclosure rates have contributed to the additional vacancies. Population declines in certain cities and high unemployment also may have contributed to increased vacancies.”

Vacant homes can cause a number of problems for the communities their located in, the report noted: “Vacant and unattended residential properties can attract crime, cause blight, and pose a threat to public safety.”

The need for action was obvious to Smucker.

“People need a place to live,” he said. “People need to have homes. Kids need to be able to count on not having to move, having some stability in their lives. That’s something we can all agree on in this country.”

Some of the most powerful stories came from the homeowners Occupiers targeted during the day’s events. One mother from Petaluma, Calif, held a press conference outside her home and discussed her struggle with foreclosure. An Oregon mother talked about her lose of a second job, cancer and bankruptcy at an event at her house.

In Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of downtown Atlanta, Occupiers came to the Pittman family home. Carmen Pittman, 21, said the home has been the backdrop to every family function and holiday dinner as far back as she can remember. The ranch-style home had been in the Pittman name since 1953.

“My every Christmas, my every Thanksgiving, my every birthday, my every dinner was in this house,” Pittman told HuffPost early this afternoon. “This was the base home. We could not stay away form this home. This home is my every memory.”

Now she worries that the last memory she will have is the home’s foreclosure. Her grandmother had become too sick to deal with the ballooning mortgage, and never addressed the court papers that arrived in the mail. Shortly before she passed away, the family finally realized the home was being foreclosed on when they got a notice on the front door. They have had to scramble ever since.

But on Tuesday, Pittman was feeling good about her prospects after the Occupy group had come to the house. “Maybe somebody heard my cries,” she said. “I’m full of sadness and joy. It’s like two mixed feelings at the same time.”

Walker, the Iraq War vet, let the Occupy Atlanta activists set up tents on her property this evening. While her eviction date is still set for Jan. 3, she said she remained cautiously optimistic that her situation could change.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Everything’s good. They have the tents set up outside. It’s awesome. I was a little nervous. But it’s awesome. I’m really hopeful and happy. I’m feeling really hopeful. I don’t feel like all is lost anymore.”

Additional reporting by Arthur Delaney.

Just some of the odd foreclosure stories of the last year:

CT Family Never Missed A Payment

see Occupy Your Home for Full story, pictures and slide shows

Shock Baitch and his wife Lisa of Connecticut were threatened with foreclosure by Bank of America after never missing a payment. BofA mistakenly told credit agencies they were seeking a loan modification. “Now I am literally and financially paying for it,” Baitch told CTWatchdog.com.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bailouts, bankruptcy, banks, borrower, Business News, countrywide, disclosure, East New York, Evictions, foreclosure, foreclosure crisis, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, GAO, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Nevada, New Orleans, New York, Occupy Atlanta, Occupy Chicago, Occupy NOLA, Occupy Our Homes, Occupy wall Street, Oregon, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, video, WEISBAND | 5 Comments »

COMFORTABLY NUMB

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

SEE WWW.THE BURNINGPLATFORM.COM

Hello?
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone at home?
Come on, now,
I hear you’re feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again.
Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb

As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can’t help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I’ve concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.

Both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement are a reflection of the mood change in the country, which is a result of government overreach, political corruption, dysfunctional economic policies, and a financial system designed to enrich the few while defrauding the many. The common theme is anger, frustration and disillusionment with a system so badly broken it appears unfixable through the existing supposedly democratic methods. The system has been captured by an oligarchy of moneyed interests from the financial industry, mega-corporations, and military industrial complex, protected by their captured puppets in Washington DC and sustained by the propaganda peddling corporate media. The differences in political parties are meaningless as they each advocate big government solutions to all social, economic, foreign relations, and monetary issues.

There is confusion and misunderstanding regarding the culprits in this drama. It was plain to me last week when I read about a small group of concerned citizens in the next town over who decided to support the Occupy movement by holding a nightly peaceful march to protest the criminal syndicate that is Wall Street and a political system designed to protect them. My local paper asked for people’s reaction to this Constitutional exercising of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Here is a sampling of the comments:

“What are those Occupy people thinking?! The whole concept is foreign to me. There are always going to be the haves and the have nots. Get over it. Blame yourself for not paying more attention in school or not working hard enough. Just wish people would take responsibility.”

“If they worked half as hard actually working as they do being a pain in everyone else’s ass, they’d be rich! Being born does not guarantee success or wealth. Only hard work does. Maybe we should let them all occupy a jail cell or two.”

“If the goal is to irritate hardworking suburban commuters on their way home, that sounds like the perfect time and location.”

“Let’s hope they don’t pitch tents and trash Lansdale. They need to look for a job, not occupy the streets.”

“I work, and even if I wasn’t working I wouldn’t (march); I would be out looking for a JOB!”

I was dumbfounded at the rage directed towards mostly young people who haven’t even begun their working careers and have played no part in the destruction of our economic system underway for the last 30 years. The people making these statements are middle aged, middle class suburbanites. They seem to be just as livid as the OWS protestors, but their ire is being directed towards the only people who have taken a stand against Wall Street greed and Washington D.C. malfeasance. I’m left scratching my head trying to understand their animosity towards people drawing attention to the enormous debt based ponzi scheme that is our country, versus their silent acquiescence to the transfer of trillions in taxpayer dollars to the criminal bankers that have destroyed the worldwide financial system. I can only come to the conclusion the average American has become so apathetic, willfully ignorant of facts and reality, distracted by the techno-gadgets that run their lives, uninterested in anything beyond next week’s episode of Dancing with the Stars or Jersey Shore, and willing to let the corporate media moguls form their opinions for them through relentless propaganda, the only thing that will get their attention is an absolute collapse of our economic scheme. Uninformed, unconcerned, intellectually vacant Americans will get exactly that in the not too distant future.

Greater Depression Hidden from View

“Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.” – Aristophanes, Plutus

The anger and vitriol directed at OWS protestors by middle class Americans is a misdirected reaction to a quandary they can’t quite comprehend. They know their lives are getting more difficult but aren’t sure why. They are paying more for energy, food, tuition, and real estate taxes, while the price of their houses decline and their wages stagnate. More than a quarter of all homeowners are underwater on their mortgage and many are drowning in credit card and student loan debt. At the same time, government drones tell them the economy is in its second year of recovery and corporate profits are at all-time highs. Government statistics, false storylines, and entitlement programs are designed to confuse the public and obscure the fact we are in the midst of another Depression. Everyone has seen the pictures of the Great Depression breadlines, farmers forced off their land during the dustbowl, and downtrodden Americans in soup kitchens. The economic conditions today are as bad as or worse than the Great Depression. This Depression is hidden from plain view because there are no unemployment lines, bread lines, or soup lines. We are experiencing an electronic Great Depression, as food stamps, unemployment compensation, Social security payments and welfare benefits are electronically delivered to millions of recipients.

There have been over 12 million foreclosure actions since 2007, with millions of Americans losing their homes. Another 16 million homeowners are underwater on their mortgages as home prices continue to fall and the economy sinks further by the day. The value of household real estate has fallen from $22.7 trillion in 2006 to $16.2 trillion today, a loss of $6.5 trillion concentrated among the middle class. In contrast, mortgage debt has only decreased by $600 billion mostly due to write-offs by the banks that created fraudulent mortgage products to lure Americans into debt.

The unemployment rate in the United States reached 25% during the Great Depression. The government manipulated fictional unemployment rate reported to the public by drones at the BLS is currently 9.0%. They conveniently ignore the millions of people who have given up looking for work and those who have taken jobs as part-time pickle ploppers at McDonalds, when they previously assembled automobiles at GM. The true number of unemployed/underemployed is 23%.

Since 2007, unemployment has officially gone up by 7 million. In reality, the same percentage of the working age population should be employed today as in 2007 (63%). Since only 58.4% of the working age population is employed today (lowest since 1983), another 4 million needs to be added to the official unemployment tally. The fact is there are 240 million working age Americans and only 140 million are employed. This means there are 100 million working age Americans not working, but our government only classifies 14 million of them as unemployed. There is certainly millions of stay at home moms, students, and legitimately disabled among the 86 million people classified as not in the labor force, but you can’t tell me that another 20 to 30 million of these people couldn’t or wouldn’t work if given the opportunity.

The deception in government reported figures is borne out by the most successful government program of the Obama administration, which has been adding participants at an astounding rate. The Food Stamp program has been a smashing success as we’ve added 13.8 million Americans to this fine program since Obama’s inauguration, a mere 43% increase in less than three years. There are now 45.8 million Americans dependent upon food stamps for survival, 14.7% of the U.S. population. This program began in 1969 and enrollment always surges during recessions and declines during recoveries. But a funny thing happened during our current “recovery”. The government reported our recession over in December 2009. It was certainly over for the Wall Street psychopaths as they rewarded themselves with $43 billion of bonuses in 2009/2010. The number of Americans on food stamps has risen by 6.8 million during this government sponsored “recovery”. You’ll be happy to know that Obama’s good buddy – Jamie Dimon – and his well run machine at JP Morgan earns hundreds of millions administering the SNAP program.

Since 2007, Federal government transfer payments have increased from $1.7 trillion annually to $2.3 trillion, a 35% increase in four years. This is surely a sign of a recovering economy. Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy has stolen $400 billion per year from senior citizens and savers and handed it to the very bankers who caused the pain and suffering of millions. Personal interest income has declined from $1.4 trillion to $1.0 trillion, while Wall Street faux profits have soared. The game plan of the oligarchy has been to transfer hundreds of billions from taxpayers to bankers, report profits through accounting entries reducing loan loss reserves, pump up their stock prices and convince clueless lemming investors to buy newly issued shares at inflated valuations. The plan has failed. The zero interest rate policy’s unintended consequences have caused revolutions throughout the Middle East and massive food inflation across the developing world.

The single biggest reason the middle class feel frustrated, angry and like they are falling behind is due to the Federal Reserve and the relentless never ending inflation they produce in order to support their masters on Wall Street and provide cover for the trillions in debt spending by politicians in Washington DC. It is no surprise that beginning in 1980 when government spending began to accelerate much more rapidly than government revenues, the government decided to “tweak” how it measured inflation. The government reports inflation at 3.5% today. The truth is inflation is running in excess of 10% if measured exactly as it was in 1980. That’s right, we have a recession and we have inflation in double digits. No wonder the masses are restless.

The reason middle class Americans are being methodically exterminated and driven into poverty is the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve. Since 1971, when Nixon extinguished the last vestiges of the gold standard and unleashed politicians to spend borrowed money without immediate consequence, the U.S. dollar has lost 82% of its purchasing power using the government manipulated CPI. In reality, it has lost over 90% of its purchasing power. The average American, after decades of being dumbed down by government sanctioned education, is incapable of understanding the impact of inflation on their lives. As their wages rise 2% to 3% per year and inflation rises 5% to 10% per year, they get poorer day by day. The Wall Street banks, who own the Federal Reserve, step in and convince the average American to substitute debt for real wealth in order to keep living the modern techno-lifestyle sold to them by mainstream corporate media.

The oligarchy of moneyed interests have done a spectacular job convincing the working middle class they should be angry at 20 year old OWS protestors, illegal immigrants and the inner city welfare class, rather than the true culprits – the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. This is a testament to the power of propaganda and the intellectual slothfulness of the average American. U.S. based mega-corporations fired 864,000 higher wage American workers between 2000 and 2010, while hiring almost 3 million workers in low wage foreign countries, using their billions in cash to buy back their own stocks, and paying corporate executives shamefully excessive compensation. The corporate mainstream media treats corporate CEO’s like rock stars as if they deserve to be compensated at a level 243 times the average worker. The S&P 500 consists of the 500 biggest companies in America and while the executives of these companies have reaped millions in compensation, the stock index for these companies is at the exact level it was on July 9, 1998. Over the last thirteen years workers were fired by the thousands, shareholders earned 0% (negative 39% on an inflation adjusted basis), and executives got fabulously rich.

Man made inflation has stealthily devastated millions of lives over the last four decades. When the weekly wages of the average worker are adjusted for inflation, they are making 12% less than they did in 1971. Using a real non-manipulated measure of inflation, the average worker is making 30% less than they did in 1971. Sadly, our math challenged populace only comprehend their wages have doubled in the last forty years, without understanding the true impact of inflation. Thankfully, the Wall Street debt dealers with a helping hand from Madison Avenue propaganda peddlers stepped up to the plate and imprisoned the middle class with the shackles of $2.5 trillion in consumer debt. So, while real wages have fallen 30% since 1971, consumer debt has increased by 1,700%.

Americans have been snookered into renouncing their citizenship and converting to being mindless consumers. Citizenship requires a person to be actively engaged in the community with obligations to fellow citizens and future generations. Consumerism requires people to love things, embrace debt, worry about what others have, and become driven by the accumulation of possessions and the appearance of wealth. The disgusting exhibition that Madison Avenue maggots have coined Black Friday is the ultimate display of consumerism. In a nauseating display of senseless spending driven by retail conglomerates, Americans act like Pavlov’s salivating dogs by lining up for hours to stampede over and pepper spray other consumers to get the ultimate deal on that Chinese made toaster oven, Vietnamese made laptop, Korean made HDTV, or Mexican made tortilla maker. They don’t seem to grasp the irony of going deeper into debt buying cheap crap made in foreign countries by the workers who took their jobs. The mainstream media proclaims a hugely successful Black Friday as millions bought crap they didn’t need with money they don’t have, while millions more ate their Thanksgiving meals in food shelters – unreported by the media.This repulsive manifestation of consumerism is applauded and encouraged by our government, as described by George Monbiot:

“Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.”

The masses have been brainwashed by those in power into thinking consumer spending utilizing debt is essential for a strong economy, when the exact opposite is the truth. Saving and investment are the essential ingredients to a strong economy. Debt based spending only benefits bankers, mega-corporations, and politicians.

Mass Manipulation through Propaganda

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda to control the masses, would be so proud of his disciples running our country today. He clearly believed only an elite few were intellectually capable of running the show. Essentially, he hit upon the concept of the 1% telling the 99% what they should think and believe over eighty years ago. The mechanisms for controlling the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of the population are so much more efficient today. The conditioning begins when we are children, as every child will be bombarded with at least 30,000 hours of propaganda broadcast by media corporations by the time they reach adulthood. Their minds are molded and they are instructed what to believe and what to value. Those in control of society want to keep the masses entertained at an infantile level, with instant gratification and satisfying desires as their only considerations. The elite have achieved their Alpha status through intellectual superiority, control of the money system, and control of the political process. Their power emanates from eliminating choices, while giving the illusion of choice to the masses. People think they are free, when in reality they are slaves to a two party political system, a few Wall Street banks, and whatever our TVs tell us to buy.

Our entire system is designed to control the thoughts and actions of the masses. In many ways it is done subtly, while recently it has become more bold and blatant. It is essential for the ruling elite to keep control of our minds through media messages and the educational system. It is not a surprise that our public education system has methodically deteriorated over the last four decades. The government gained control over education and purposely teaches our children selected historical myths, social engineering gibberish and only the bare essentials of math and science. The government creates the standardized tests and approves the textbooks. We are left with millions of functionally illiterate children that grow into non-critical thinking adults. This is the exact result desired by the 1%. If too many of the 99% were able to ignore the media propaganda and think for themselves, revolution would result. This is why the moneyed interests have circled the wagons, invoked police state thug tactics, and used all the powers of their media machine to squash the OWS movement. It threatens their power and control.

“Experience has shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” – Thomas Jefferson

A highly educated engaged citizenry would be a danger to the existing social order. The 1%, educated at our finest universities, does not want average Americans to obtain a great education for a reasonable price. They want them to get a worthless diploma at an excessively high price tag and become debt slaves to the Wall Street 1%. They want uneducated, indebted consumers, not educated productive citizens. Our republic has been slowly perverted since the time of its inception. The insidious process had been slow and methodical until 1913. The establishment of the Federal Reserve by an elite group of bankers and their politician friends and the establishment of a personal income tax created the conditions that have allowed a small cabal of powerful men to dictate the course of our economic, political, social, and military policies for the last 98 years. Anyone that chooses to open their eyes and awake from the propaganda induced stupor can see the result of allowing a small group of corrupt authoritarian men using their power to pervert our government into tyranny. The majority remains oppressed, buried under trillions of debt, while the shysters reap obscene profits, poison the worldwide economic system, and walk away unscathed in the aftermath of their crimes.

The ruling oligarchy has become so brazen in the last few years that it has attracted the attention of the critical thinking minority. The advent of the internet has allowed these critical thinking few to analyze the un-sanitized facts, discuss the issues, and provide truth amidst a blizzard of lies. The proliferation of truth telling websites (Zero Hedge, Mish, Financial Sense, Naked Capitalism) has allowed truth seekers to bypass the government sanctioned corporate media. The pillaging of society by the politically powerful, corrupt 1% is plain to see in the graphs below.

The divergence in household income was not the result of hard work, superior intellectual firepower, or the media touted entrepreneurial spirit of the rich. It was the result of the 1% capturing the economic and political system of the United States and using it to ransack the wealth of the formerly working middle class. The fatal flaw which will ultimately result in a fitting end for the powerful elitists is their egos. They are psychopaths, unable to feel empathy for their fellow man. Enough is never enough. They always want more. Life is a game to them. They truly believe they can pull the right strings and continue to accumulate more riches. But they are wrong. They are blinded by their hubris. There are limits to growth based solely on debt and we’ve reached that limit. The world is crumbling under the weight of crippling debt created by these Wall Street psychopaths, while the corrupted bought off politicians try to shift the losses from the bankers who incurred them to the citizens who have already been fleeced. Nomi Prins captures the essence of our current situation:

“Today, the stock prices of the largest US banks are about as low as they were in the early part of 2009, not because of euro-contagion or Super-committee super-incompetence (a useless distraction anyway) but because of the ongoing transparency void surrounding the biggest banks amidst their central-bank-covered risks, and the political hot potato of how many emergency loans are required to keep them afloat at any given moment. Because investors don’t know their true exposures, any more than in early 2009. Because US banks catalyzed the global crisis that is currently manifesting itself in Europe. Because there never was a separate US housing crisis and European debt crisis. Instead, there is a worldwide, systemic, unregulated, uncontained, rapacious need for the most powerful banks and financial institutions to leverage whatever could be leveraged in whatever forms it could be leveraged in. So, now we’re just barely in the second quarter of the game of thrones, where the big banks are the kings, the ECB, IMF and the Fed are the money supply, and the populations are the powerless serfs. Yeah, let’s play the ECB inflation game, while the world crumbles.”

Those in power are beginning to lose control. You can sense their desperation. Their propaganda is losing its impact as the pain for millions of Americans has become acute. The outrage and anger flaring across the country on a daily basis, reflected in the OWS movement, is just the beginning of a revolutionary period descending upon this nation. The existing social order will be swept away, but they will not go without a fight. They will use their control of the police, military and media to try and crush the coming rebellion.

The Dream is Gone

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” – Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

In addition to controlling the monetary system and brainwashing the inhabitants with relentless propaganda, the ruling class has used their control of the political process to impose thousands of laws, statutes, rules, and regulations upon the citizens. Again, an apathetic, distracted, trusting populace has been easily convinced that more laws will make them safe and secure. They have willingly sacrificed liberty, freedom and self reliance for the façade of safety, security and protection. The overwhelming number of government rules and regulations are designed to control you and insure your compliance and obedience to those in power. In a non-corrupt society inhabited by citizens willing to honor their obligations, government’s function is to insure property rights and defend the country from foreign invaders. Citizens don’t need to be herded like sheep with threats of imprisonment to do what is right. We don’t need 90,000 pages of regulations telling us the difference between right and wrong.

There were 400 pages of Federal Tax rules when the 1% personal income tax was implemented in 1913. Did the 18,000% increase in tax rules since 1913 benefit the average American or did they benefit the 1% who hires the lobbyists to write the rules which are passed into law by the politicians who receive their campaign contributions from the 1%? Do you ever wonder why you pay more taxes than a billionaire Wall Street hedge fund manager? Do you think our tax system is designed to benefit billionaires and mega-corporations when corporations with billions of income pay little or no taxes? Complexity and confusion benefits those who can create and take advantage of the complexity and confusion. Corporations and special interests have used their wealth to bribe politicians to design loopholes, credits, and exemptions that benefit their interests. The corruption of the system is terminal.

“The mistake you make, don’t you see, is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You’re trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can’t. One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can’t put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.” – George Orwell

The American people are paying the price for allowing a few evil men to gain control of our government. The American people cowered in fear as the 342 page Patriot Act was somehow written in a few weeks after 9/11, introduced in Congress on October 23, passed the House on October 24 with no debate, passed the Senate on October 25 with no debate, and signed into law on October 26 by George Bush. A law passed by the ruling elite that stripped Americans of their freedoms and liberties was passed using fear mongering false patriotism propaganda to squelch dissent and the American people had no say in the matter. The government has used fear to keep the American people under control. We now unquestioningly accept being molested in airports. We shrug as our intelligence agencies eavesdrop on our telephone conversations and emails without the need for a court order. It is now taken for granted that we imprison people without charging them with a crime and assassinate suspected terrorists in foreign countries with predator drones. Invading countries and going to war no longer requires a declaration of war by Congress as required by the Constitution. The State grows ever more powerful.

Therefore, it is no surprise that Americans sit idly by, watching their 52 inch HDTVs, as young people across the country are beaten, pepper sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and tear gas, and scorned and ridiculed by corporate media pundits for exercising their free speech rights to peacefully protest our corrupt system. The American tradition of civil disobedience is considered domestic terrorism by those in authority. Our beloved protectors in the Orwellian named Department of Homeland Security write reports classifying Ron Paul supporters and returning Iraq veterans as potential terrorists. If the powers that be get their way, the internet will be locked down and controlled, as it poses a huge threat to their thought control endeavors. Freedom to think, learn, question and organize resistance is unacceptable in the eyes of the elite. The country has reached a tipping point. Will enough right thinking Americans stand up and fight to bring down this corrupt system, or will we be herded silently to slaughter. The truth is there is something terribly wrong in this country. We are facing a myriad of problems that will require courage and common sense to overcome. We need only look in the mirror to find the guilty party. It is time to stop letting fear dictate our actions. Conflict is coming to this country due to the evil sanctioned by our corrupt leaders and the upright men and women who will bear the burden of destroying that evil.

Our civilization has adopted the worst aspects of the two most famous dystopian novels in history – Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The question is whether the population of this country is too far gone to recover. The answer to that question will determine whether the country chooses authoritarian dictatorship or a renewal of our founding principles. Aldous Huxley understood the three pillars of Western civilization fifty years ago and that their destruction would result in a collapse of our economic system:

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

The three pillars sustaining the American empire edifice of never ending war, ever accumulating debt and excessive consumerism are crumbling. The growing corruption and weight of un-payable debt have weakened the very foundation of our grand experiment. The existing structure will surely collapse. My entire adult life has tracked the decline of the American empire. I had become comfortably numb. I came to my senses and began to question all the Federal government/Wall Street/Corporate Media sponsored truths about eight years ago. Many others have also awoken and begun to challenge the false storylines dictated by those in power.

The young people leading the protests across this land are showing tremendous courage and a tenacity of spirit that has been dormant for decades among the lethargic, distracted, over-medicated public. Despite being subjected to government education conditioning, these young people have zeroed in on the enemy. They may not have all the solutions, but they have correctly identified the corrupt banking system as the central nervous system of this vampire squid sucking the life out of our nation. I will support any effort to shine a light on our crooked system. My three young sons deserve a chance at a better life than they will get under the thumb of this oligarchic criminal enterprise. As a child I caught a fleeting glimpse of the American Dream. I turned to look, but it was gone. I choose not to become comfortably numb. I choose to do whatever it will take to renew the opportunity for my sons to achieve the American Dream.

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.

Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: 9/11, bankruptcy, Barack Obama, borrower, CEO pay, Comfortably Numb, countrywide, CPI, Department of Homeland Security, disclosure, Edward Bernays, Federal reserve, Food stamps, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, George Bush, home prices, inflation, internet, Jamie Dimon, LOAN MODIFICATION, Mainstream media, modification, National Debt, Occupy wall Street, Patriot Act, Pink Floyd, Police, Propaganda, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, Revolution, Ron Paul, ruling oligarchy, securitization, Shadow Stats, SNAP, terrorists, TILA audit, trustee, unemployment, Wall Street conspiracy, WEISBAND, Zero Hedge | 19 Comments »

Occupy Wall Street Groups Protest Foreclosure, Try To Halt Evictions

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

11/16/11 04:49 PM ET

Monique White of North Minneapolis has been hosting weekend barbecues for friends and family for years. On Sunday, her usual guest list of friends and neighbors expanded to include protesters from the local spinoff of the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’d come to try and stop the bank from throwing White out of her house.

“These people are here to support me — and not only me, just to let other people know and be aware of what’s going on,” White said.

What’s going on is American homeowners are still slogging through the aftermath of a recession caused by the near-collapse of the financial sector in 2008. Since then, bailed-out banks have allegedly treated struggling homeowners so badly that state and federal law enforcement agencies are negotiating a multi-billion dollar settlement, and federal bank regulators have offered to check for wrongdoing in any foreclosure that happened in 2009 or 2010.

Occupy Wall Street kicked off in September to protest economic injustice, and now in at least three American cities, Occupy protesters are using the stories of local residents losing their homes to dramatize and protest the ongoing foreclosure crisis. In each case, Occupy-affiliated protesters have pitched their tents on the lawns where they don’t want to see local sheriff’s deputies pile the belongings of an evicted family.

On Sunday evening, 15 or so protesters came to Elizabeth Sommerer’s home in Cleveland. They’d heard via Twitter that Sommerer, a mother of two, would be evicted on Tuesday.

“We’d been talking for a few weeks about ways to draw attention to what’s going on with the foreclosure crisis,” said protester Chris Soboleski, a 29-year-old web developer from Painesville, Ohio.

Sommerer’s home went into foreclosure in 2009, Cuyahoga County records show. Her husband postponed the sheriff’s sale by filing for bankruptcy. But they couldn’t keep up with their Chapter 13 payments, and then, Sommerers said, she and her husband split up. Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage company, bought the property in August.

Soboleski and other Occupy protesters helped Sommerer connect with her local representative on the Cleveland City Council, Brian Cummins, whose staff helped her get to court on Monday to file a request to postpone the eviction for 30 days. Her request was granted, court records show.

“I think it was a huge day for the movement,” said Cummins, a member of the Green Party. “This is really great because it got them out in the community and in touch with someone in a very real life situation.”

“They stand up for the little guy,” Sommerer said of the protesters in a video uploaded to YouTube on Monday. (Soboleski said Sommerer did not want to do another interview about her situation after already providing details to local reporters. Independent attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.) “This is Main Street. Wall Street can take care of itself. Main Street needs everybody.”

Sommerer said she’s looking for work and a nearby place to live so her kids don’t have to change schools. She’d be happy to rent her former home from Fannie Mae if possible. “I was not raised to be a freeloader. I don’t want to be a freeloader. I will pay my way. I just need time to put it together,” she said in the video.

“Even if you do have to foreclose on someone, you can do it with a certain amount of compassion and humanity,” Soboleski said. “There’s a certain amount to be said for rules, but on the other hand we all want to live in a society where humanity matters more than bureaucracy.”

Not all of the Occupy actions have been successful. In Snellville, Ga., protesters failed to prevent the eviction of the Rorey family, who told the Gwinnett Daily Post they fell victim to a scam artist who promised them lower monthly payments in 2010. The difficulty of obtaining loan modifications since the collapse of the housing bubble has made it easy for scam artists to prey on desperate homeowners, who have been susceptible to claims that a hired “expert” knows secrets to obtaining loan mods they don’t.

Fannie Mae, which has owned the property since last year, said it works to prevent foreclosures.

“We have a Mortgage Help Center in Atlanta where homeowners can meet with a trusted housing counselor to discuss their mortgage situation and options to avoid foreclosure,” a Fannie Mae spokeswoman said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the homeowner did not seek assistance from our Help Center.”

Occupy protesters in Minneapolis hope they’ll have better luck with Monique White. Thirty or so protesters have been camping in her living room and kitchen, with some spilling out onto her lawn, since November 8.

“I’ve never had this many people in my house before. It gets kind of overwhelming sometimes,” White said. All the same, she added, “I appreciate everything that they’ve done for me.”

White fell behind on her payments in 2009. The following February, as she was trying to get a loan modification from U.S. Bank, she said, budget cuts cost her her job counseling at-risk kids for a non-profit. “That’s when everything started spiraling out.”

The Occupy protesters say U.S. Bank should cut White some slack.

“They just had record profits this quarter, and the CEO of US Bank, Richard Davis, just doubled his salary to $19 million,” said Nick Espinosa, 25. “So what we’re talking about with a family like Monique’s is pennies to them.”

Government-backed mortgage company Freddie Mac bought her house as a foreclosure in January, and U.S. Bank said what happens is now up to Freddie. Freddie Mac said White’s eviction has already been postponed and that the company was considering her for a program that would allow her to rent the property.

White said she has been working a part-time job at a liquor store and is desperately looking for new work.

“Basically what I’m looking for is for U.S. Bank to rewrite my loans in order for me to stay in my home and make it affordable for me,” White said. “I’m not asking for a handout. All I’m asking is for time or for Freddie Mac or U.S. Bank, whoever owns the house or is trying to take the house, to come to the table.”

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, Eviction, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, mortgage modification, Occupy Atlanta, Occupy Cleveland, Occupy Minnesota, Occupy wall Street, Occupy Wall Street Foreclosure, Politics News, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, video, WEISBAND | 24 Comments »

Nomi Prins: 10 Reasons Bank of America Is the Most Hated Bank in America

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nomi Prins is a former investment banker. Like me she sees the function of Wall Street as vital to a growing economy and better society. It’s not banks she dislikes, it is the people who run them and what they have done to the banks, the shareholders, the customers and its trading partners. Wall Street has become de-personalized in the sense that its institutions are mere vehicles for management to strip everyone — including the Banks they manage — of everything and put the results in their own personal pocket. Their “relationships” with members of congress and state legislators is the reason why we have a dysfunctional economy.

It isn’t working for most of us and there can be no doubt that as long as Banks regard the rest of us with disdain and contempt they will treat us accordingly. The disdain for the law, the rules, morality ethics and just common sense is a reflection not of the institution of banking and finance but of the people who have usurped Wall Street and turned it into a vehicle for a government coup. They control our lives in ever-increasing ways covering activities and needs that we don’t ordinarily associate with Banks. If insurance is involved, then the Banks are right there. If we lose social services like fire, police and even trash collection — see the banks for where the money went. But the Banks are not actually prospering. It is the management of the Banks that is prospering.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the Occupy movement has attracted people across all class liens and political spectrums. We all know the system isn’t working and we are unwilling to see it continue down the drain. As long as BOA is allowed to maintain financial positions ($53 Trillion) that exceed the world’s money supply ($50 Trillion), we will continue to have this problem because it gives them an out-sized appearance of threat to the system. In truth, I don’t think anyone would miss them.

10 Reasons Bank of America Is the Most Hated Bank in America

Here are ten reasons to take your money out of Bank of America – and park it at a credit union or community bank near you.

October 27, 2011 |

There is no shortage of hatred for the biggest banks. Indeed, the Occupy Wall Street movement is leading a national revolution against these byzantine, powerful Goliaths for the economic devastation they have caused. This makes it difficult to choose the worst of the bunch. That said, a strong case can be made that Bank of America deserves the title of the nation’s most despised bank.

Here are ten reasons to take your money out of Bank of America – and park it at a credit union or community bank near you. (And yes, that may be near impossible if you have a mortgage with them, as refinancing away from any big bank nowadays is a nightmare.)

1. B of A rejects the right of customers to protest. When two Occupy Santa Cruz protesters in California marched into a local Bank of America to close their accounts, the response was, “You cannot be a protester and a customer at the same time,” followed by a threat to call the police if the women didn’t leave. (The attending officer later reiterated the bank manager’s message.) Meanwhile, the fact that Bank of America charges a fee for closing an account prompted Rep. Brad Miller (D-North Carolina), who resides in Bank of America’s headquarters state, to introduce a bill to protect customers from such fees.

2. To recoup ongoing losses from its stupendously dumb acquisitions of Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, B of A pillages its customers. Thus, despite massive public outrage, the $5 debit usage fee for customers with less than a $5,000 balance and no mortgage with the bank will begin in 2012. B of A was the first large bank to confirm it would charge this fee, which is the highest in current discourse among the banks.

On October 18, Consumers Union wrote a letter to B of A chief Brian Moynihan asking him to reconsider this fee, which impacts poorer clients disproportionately. The letter summed it up nicely: “Consumers should not be required to pay a costly fee that appears to be arbitrary and designed to generate income to make up for Bank of America’s bad business decisions rather than covering the costs of providing debit card services.” Banks collect 24 cents from retailers for each customer swipe, much more than the median 8 cents it costs a bank to process the purchase. Senator Dick Durbin’s (D-Illinois) response was to urge customers: “Vote with your feet. Get the heck out of that bank.”

3. B of A’s other fees are just as bad. According to its last annual report, the bank has 29.3 million active online subscribers who paid over $300 billion worth of bills in 2010. In May, B of Araised its checking account fees, which included e-banking, to $12, in line with JP Morgan Chase’s decision to do the same, up from $8.95 per month. In June, it started a $35 overdraft fee, even on overdrafts of one cent. Next year, it will incorporate basic checking with a new “essentials” account structure that makes monthly fees unavoidable, that will not include free bill pay, and that has a mandatory $6 minimum fee.

Last Monday, Bank of America was charged (along with JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo) with colluding with the two major credit card companies, Visa and MasterCard, to keep ATM fees high; in other words, they were charged with “price-fixing,” in direct opposition to antitrust laws. This is the third of three such suits filed recently, each seeking class action status.

4. Bank of America takes gross advantage of the military.

It is the official bank of the US military and has branches by or on many bases, which provides the firm with another locus of extortion. B of A can entice military personnel to take out loans at usurious rates. Personal loans made to soldiers for a few thousand dollars can actually keep them indebted for the rest of their lives.

Last May, Bank of America paid $22 million to settle charges of improperly foreclosing on active-duty troops. The firm spun these foreclosures as being Countrywide’s fault for having started them before becoming part of B of A.

5. Bank of America is officially rated the biggest, scariest bank. Its stock price also fared the worst of the group of banks (which also included Citigroup and Wells Fargo) when Moody’s Investors Service downgraded it on September 21.

B of A’s long-term holding company (parent bank) rating was chopped two notches to Baa1 from A2, and its retail bank rating was cut two notches from A2 to Aa3, placing B of A four notches below rival JP Morgan Chase and one below Citigroup, the third-largest US bank. Its bank holding company has the lowest rating among the top five banks with the largest derivatives positions.

This caused great fear for investors involved in derivatives trades with the Merrill Lynch division, prompting them to request trades be moved to the part of the bank with the better rating – the retail part with the insured (peoples’) deposits. That way, B of A doesn’t have to pony up as much collateral to back the trades, as it would in a subsidiary with a lower rating. The Fed was recklessly happy to approve, despite the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) misgiving about having to insure more risk, even if it can borrow from the US Treasury to do so. Meanwhile, Bank of America’s stock price got so crushed that Warren Buffett scooped up a $5 billion preferred stock deal, effectively betting that the government won’t let this big bank go bust.

6. B of A’s derivatives position keeps rising. The total amount of derivatives in the FDIC-insured portion of B of A as of mid-year was $53.7 trillion, up 10 percent from $48.9 trillion the prior year, and up nearly 35 percent from its pre-fall crisis level of $40 trillion (the Merrill Lynch securities division holds $22 trillion in addition.) The bank has $5 trillion of credit derivatives, nearly double its $2.7 trillion pre-Merrill amount. In addition, because of its inherent zombie status and rating downgrades, the cost of insuring B of A against a possible default continues to rise in the credit derivatives market – a pattern that American International group (AIG) once followed.

7. Bank of America got the most AIG money of the big depositor banks. By virtue of having acquired Merrill Lynch’s AIG-related portfolio, B of A got to keep approximately $12 billion worth of federal AIG backing, too. It also received more government subsidies than any other mega-bank except Citigroup. Its stimulus package included an initial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) helping of $15 billion for the bank and $10 billion for Merrill, plus a second helping of $20 billion in January 2009 after it became clear that Merrill’s losses had spiked to $15 billion – in order to ensure the takeover from hell went through and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and then-Merrill Lynch executive John Thain could pat themselves on the back for saving the world. The government guaranteed $118 billion in assets, mostly Merrill’s, in the new merged firm. With the benefit of the Fed’s nearly 0 percent money policy, and a depositor base to plunder, B of A repaid that aid.

In terms of overall federal subsidies (including TARP), Bank of America was second only to Citigroup ($230 billion compared to $415 billion). None of that got in the way of former B of A CEO Ken Lewis’ personal take, a $63 million retirement plan, in addition to the $63 million he scored during the three years before his departure.

8. Bank of America leads the big bank fraud lawsuit settlement tally. So far, it has racked up the largest settlement, $8.5 billion in June, to settle claims related to $100 billion worth of Countrywide-spun mortgage securities backed by faulty loans, with bigwig investors like Pimco, BlackRock, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

B of A is also being sued by state and federal regulators for questionable foreclosure practices and a union benefits plan for hiding foreclosure problems that impacted its share price. It is one of 17 major US financial institutions being sued by the Federal Housing Finance Agency for billions of dollars of mortgage-securities-related losses that may require B of A to potentially repurchase $50 billion worth of allegedly fraudulent securities. Earlier this year, B of A settled for $3 billion regarding bad loans that they had repackaged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as agreed to a $624 million settlement in a securities fraud class-action suit filed by New York Sate and City pension fund regarding Countrywide stock losses. Then there’s AIG’s August lawsuit, in which AIG wants $10 billion in damages for mortgage-related securities it bought and against which it claims B of A committed securities fraud.

That’s a lot of pain for a Federal Reserve-approved $4.1 billion acquisition. Meanwhile, since the settlement didn’t lead to a financial restatement, under the supremely elastic (read: useless) Dodd-Frank Act, executives get to keep their related bonuses.

9. Even after lawsuits, B of A would still rather please investors than customers. Investors that won money in the $8.5 billion settlement were upset that B of A was continuing to service loans, instead of foreclosing on them more quickly. Now, B of A had a nasty incentive to kick people out of homes faster, rather than work with them to refinance or restructure mortgages. Two months later, their foreclosure process has, in fact, sped up.

Bank of America foreclosure notices are surging again following a slight robo-signing- related slowdown, meaning they are now sending out a greater increase in default notices (90-day overdue loans) than other banks. The bank has $30 billion in residential mortgage loans in default, which will become foreclosures for thousands of families.

10. Bank of America, despite having been buoyed up by the government, did not pay taxes, and, given its glorious ineptness, will be laying off 30,000 workers. Not only did the bank pay no federal taxes for 2010 (or 2009) by making use of its posted pre-tax loss of $5.4 billion, it actually cited a tax benefit of $1 billion. Meanwhile, it has announced plans to cut up to 30,000 jobs over the next few years as part of its plan to save $5 billion, ostensibly due to the settlements it’s paying for engaging in upper-management-approved fraud.

Finally, consider the two reasons that any of this list is possible. One is the Glass-Steagall Act repeal, which enables banks to comingle straight costumer business with reckless securities creation and trading. The second reason is coddling by a Fed that finances and approves every bad move. B of A is the poster child for a Glass-Steagall repeal gone wrong. Lewis pulled in a slew of other banks under the B of A umbrella, making it – at one time – the country’s largest bank, including the infamous Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch. Now it has $2.26 trillion in total assets and $1.8 trillion assets in insured subsidiaries, $1.2 trillion of customer deposits ($1.066 trillion in the United States) and about $804 billion in FDIC-insured deposits – all part of the giant, risk-laden mess that is B of A.

Without being broken up via a new, strong Glass-Steagall Act, when banks need to find ways to make money, they resort to extorting it from their sitting ducks, er – customers. Meanwhile, that’s where credit unions, which are not-for-profits owned by their members and not by outside shareholders, come in. They generally don’t engage in crazy derivatives trades, or charge unnecessary fees for holding your money or for letting you pay bills with it, or for online banking. In terms of personal attention, among other economic reasons, the credit and smaller community banks are a much better bet.

Bank of America CEO ‘Incensed’ by Critics (Crooks and Liars)

4 Simple Steps for Taking Your Money Out of the Vampire Banks (AlterNet)

A New Declaration of Independence: 10 Ideas for Taking America Back from the 1%

Occupy Wall Street is Transforming its Participants, Our Country, and Democracy

PROGRESSIVE WIRE

Occupy the top 1% … get elected to Congress

Bill Gates: ‘I’m Generally In Favor’ Of The Rich Paying More In Taxes

Bank of America Reconsidering $5 Monthly Debit Card Fee

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Cops Blame Occupy Wall Street for Surge in Shootings But City Wastes Money Policing Nonviolent Protesters

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Occupy Wall Street Protester, Arrested and Jailed for 30 Hours, Tells Her Story for the First Time

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Oakland Police Violence Raises the Stakes for the OWS Movement

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Occupy Wall Street Doctors: MDs for Social Justice Join Protest In Liberty Square

OCCUPY WALL STREET

Inside the New Occupy Wall Street Economy

4 Simple Steps for Taking Your Money Out of the Vampire Banks
Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters in Tax-Funded Center
Pam Martens, CounterPunch
Don’t Diss The Drum Circles: Why Hippie Culture Is Still Important to Our Protests
Danny Goldberg, Dissent Magazine
The Stunning Victory That Occupy Wall Street Has Already Achieved
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Legal Rights for Fertilized Eggs? How a Terrifying Law Could Lead to Jail-time for Miscarriages, Birth Control Bans, and the End of Legal Abortion
Irin Carmon, Salon
Occupy Wall Street Protester, Arrested and Jailed for 30 Hours, Tells Her Story for the First Time
Barbara Schneider Reilly, AlterNet
5 Places Where the Rich Got Richer — Mostly on the Government’s Dime
Daniel Denvir, John Paul Dewitt, Salon
How the Bitter Elitists at Fox News Keep Trying — And Failing — to Dampen Support for Occupy Wall Street
Mark Howard, AlterNet

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Nomi Prins, occupy, Occupy wall Street, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 7 Comments »

Buoyed by Occupy Wall Street, Thousands Take to the Streets Across the Globe

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

“I have no problem with capitalism,” Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin. “But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical . We shouldn’t bail out the banks. We should bail out the people.”

“Times Square represents business as usual — buy, buy, buy in this economic climate, watch the latest show,” said Elias Holtz, 29, a Web designer who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “But the crisis is everywhere.”

“We don’t feel represented by the government. We feel made fun of,” Alessia Tridici, 18, said in Rome. “We’re upset because we don’t have prospects for the future. We’ll never see a pension. We’ll have to work until we die.”

Buoyed by Wall St. Protests, Rallies Sweep the Globe

By CARA BUCKLEY and RACHEL DONADIO

Buoyed by the longevity of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan, a wave of protests swept across Asia, the Americas and Europe over the weekend, with hundreds and in some cases thousands of people expressing discontent with the economic tides in marches, rallies and occasional clashes with the police.

In Rome on Saturday, a rally thick with tension spread over several miles. Small groups of restive young people turned a largely peaceful protest into a riot, setting fire to at least one building and a police van and clashing with police officers, who responded with water cannons and tear gas. The police estimated that dozens of protesters had been injured, along with 26 law enforcement officials; 12 people were arrested.

By early Sunday in New York, 92 people had been arrested, including 24 accused of trespassing in a Greenwich Village branch of Citibank and 45 during a raucous rally of thousands of people in and around Times Square. More than 1,000 people filled Washington Square Park on Saturday night, but almost all of them left after dozens of police officers with batons and helmets streamed through the arch and warned that they would be enforcing a midnight curfew. Fourteen were arrested for remaining in the park.

Three police officers were injured dealing with a rambunctious crowd at 46th Street and 7th Avenue; they were treated at Bellevue Hospital Center and released.

In Chicago, about 175 people were arrested at about 1 a.m. on Sunday after refusing to leave Grant Park before the 11 p.m. closing time, said Officer Laura Kubiak, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department.Other than in Rome, the demonstrations across Europe were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Similar scenes unfolded across cities on several continents, including in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; Hong Kong; Toronto; and Los Angeles, where several thousand people marched to City Hall as passing drivers honked their support.

But just as the rallies in New York have represented a variety of messages — signs have been held in opposition to President Obama yards away from signs in support of him — so did Saturday’s protests contain a grab bag of sentiments, opposing nuclear power, political corruption and the privatization of water.

Yet despite the difference in language, landscape and scale, the protests were united in frustration with the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

In New York, where the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan was moving into its second month, a large crowd marched north early Saturday afternoon to Washington Square Park, where it was joined by several hundred college students who decried, among other things, student debt and unemployment.

In late afternoon, the crowds marched up Avenue of the Americas toward a heavily barricaded Times Square, beseeching onlookers to join in with cries of “You are the 99 percent.”

At Times Square, they convened with thousands of other protesters and caught hundreds of tourists unawares. “We thought they were going to stay down on Wall Street,” said Sandi Bernard — who is 59 and was visiting from Waldorf, Md. — while wondering if she would have trouble making the 8 p.m. curtain call for “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

Some tourists pumped their fists and whooped from atop double-decker sightseeing buses as the protesters cheered back. To keep 42nd Street clear the police shunted marchers up to 46th Street, where officers and the pressed-in masses had several run-ins. At one point the police pushed the barricades in toward the crowd, and the crowd pushed back. At another point two mounted officers moved their horses briefly into the throng.

Three people were arrested trying to take down barricades, the police said. Later, as officers tried to disperse people east on 46th Street, 42 people who the police said defied their orders were taken away, in plastic handcuffs, in three police wagons. One witness, Harry Kaback, a 26-year-old comic selling tickets to the Ha! comedy club, said the protesters were “getting rowdy” with the police and shouting in their faces.

For the protesters, marching on Times Square held almost as much significance as did protesting against Wall Street.

The protest moved back to Washington Square Park, where people listened to speeches and debated whether to stay while police officers marched down Fifth Avenue and into the square. One officer gave a warning as midnight approached: “The park closes at 24:00 hours. You can exit to the east, west or south. You have 10 minutes.”

Virtually everyone chose to leave, save 14 protesters who remained sitting in the dry bed of the park’s fountain and were arrested, the police said. Many headed back to Zuccotti Park, where there is no curfew.

Earlier, about a dozen protesters entered a Chase branch in Lower Manhattan and withdrew their money from the bank while 300 other people circled the block, some shouting chants and beating on drums. The former Chase customers, who declined to reveal how much they had in their accounts — though a few acknowledged it was not much — said they planned to put their money into smaller banks or credit unions.

“The more resources we give to small institutions, the more they’ll be able to provide conveniences like free A.T.M.’s and streamlined online banking so they can compete with the larger banks,” said Hannah Appel, 33, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

Five people wearing masks were arrested during the march to Times Square for “loitering with masks,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, an apparent reference to an old state law prohibiting masked gatherings (the law does not apply to masquerade parties).

And two dozen people were arrested at a Citibank branch on LaGuardia Place on trespassing charges.

Some witnesses said that the protesters had tried to leave but were locked inside by bank employees. “They were trying to leave, but they wouldn’t let them,” said Meaghan Linick, 23, of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She said one woman who had been inside and left was forced back inside by police officers.

Citibank, in a statement, said the protesters “were very disruptive and refused to leave after being repeatedly asked, causing our staff to call 911.” The statement continued, “The police asked the branch staff to close the branch until the protesters could be removed.”

In Washington, several hundred people marched through downtown, beginning in the early morning, passing by several banks. Escorted by the police, the marchers also demonstrated in front of the White House and the Treasury Department before moving on to a rally on the National Mall, where they were joined by representatives of unions and other supporters.

“You see how people are beholden to corporate interests no matter how hard you might have worked to get them elected,” said Kelly Mears, 24, a former software engineer. “There is a disconnect.”

Saturday’s protests sprang not only from the Occupy Wall Street movement that began last month in New York, but also from demonstrations in Spain in May. This weekend, the global protest effort came as finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations meet in Paris to discuss economic issues, including ways to tackle Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.

Tens of thousands of protesters assembled in Madrid on Saturday evening, when chants mingled with live music, including a rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” lending the downtown area an upbeat feel on an unusually balmy fall afternoon.

Brief clashes were reported in London, where the police were out in force with dozens of riot vans, canine units and hundreds of officers. But the gathering, attended by people of all ages, was largely peaceful, with a picnic atmosphere and people streaming in and out of a nearby Starbucks.

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, made an appearance when a crowd assembled in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. To loud cheers, Mr. Assange called the protest movement “the culmination of a dream.”

In Rome, the protests Saturday were as much about the growing dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who narrowly survived a vote of confidence on Friday, as they were about global financial inequities. Tens of thousands of people turned out for what started as peaceful protests and then devolved into ugly violence. The windows of shops and banks were smashed, a police van was destroyed, and some Defense Ministry offices were set alight.

Cara Buckley reported from New York, and Rachel Donadio from Rome. Reporting was contributed by Jack Ewing from Frankfurt; Nicholas Kulish from Berlin; Joseph Goldstein, Elizabeth A. Harris, Colin Moynihan and Christopher Maag from New York; Catherine Garcia from Los Angeles; Raphael Minder from Madrid; Ron Nixon from Washington; and Ravi Somaiya from London.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, occupy, Occupy wall Street, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 17 Comments »

OCCUPY WALL STREET: SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

Show up today at noon at Cesar Chavez Plaza, 201 W. Washington St., for what could be the first day of a prolonged assembly, following the path of ongoing Occupy demonstrations in New York and other cities.

“The only thing that the protesters agree with Wall Street is on the word “enough.” They have had enough of this double-talk and they want their fair share of the pie that Wall Street created with the peoples’ savings, their pension plans, their homes and everything else of value that is now a basis for charging interest and making a profit in exchanging paper. A real GDP comprised not of “financial services” (trading paper back and forth between the same parties) but rather in performing real work, which is what the 99% do every day, is the only path to recovery. The people know it and they are going to demand it. Whether they get it or not, depends upon whether you show up at the events near you.” Neil Garfield livinglies.me

Protests Against Banks Rise in Number and Intensity in Major Cities Around the Globe

EDITOR’S REPORT: From Rome, Berlin, London, Frankfurt to Sydney, Australia and dozens of other countries in Asia, Europe, and across North America protesters are taking to the streets – a feat of improbable dimensions considering the ease of sitting back and using email, twitter and other social media. The message is the same — we want our lives back, now. The past bailouts of the banks started a fire of angst amongst people of all ages, employment, wealth and political stripes. The current focus on saving the banks instead of the people has thrown fuel on a fire that was raging in the hearts of all people whose lives have been dismantled by the workings of the Banks.

The Banks are fighting back but their guns are empty when it comes to the moral and practical choices in front of us. People are angry and fearful and they are right. As pointed out by Joe Nocera in his opinion piece this morning in the New York Times, the parallels with the 1930’s are too close for comfort. And the idea that government or Bankers can convince us to have “confidence” is proof that confidence has left the room. We have lost confidence in our economic system, and in our political system which is hostage to the financial giants that control far too much in ways that raise barriers to competition for people to assemble, bargain or negotiate collectively from strength or even demand fairness.

The only thing left is for people to take to the streets, something that has been predicted here for years along with many other writers on blogs, newspapers and magazines. As the movement grows, the weak responses from Wall Street and those who seem bent on voting against their own interests, are finally being answered — power is in the people. Government retains power only so long as people let it.

It is comforting to know that the relatively unknown organizers who started this protest on Wall Street could make such a difference. They know the power that comes from people assembling to petition for grievances. And they understand the need for discipline,patience and persistence. They understand that the message must be allowed to mature and grow before it becomes a list of demands, and that the size of the response to demands for reform will be directly correlated with the size of the protest. To grow the numbers and present a credible threat to those who would continue to exercise power at the expense of ordinarily people, they are using their formidable powers and talents using the experience of community organizing and promoting causes that we all can agree are right.

Of course the banks will claim anarchy, drugs, sex and other criminal behavior to prevent others from joining this movement. But the flash quality of this uprising obviously drowns out those narratives that only a few weeks ago were the theme of reporting and opinions. These are people who are working, who want to work and who want to work in jobs for a fair wage that will support their families. For the last thirty years, the mantra of a thriving economy has hidden the fact that practically nobody was seeing the benefit without going into an impossible amount of debt.

Wall Street used the pension money of the people to flood the market with cheap money which in turn fueled a spending spree by consumers who were not learned in the exotic consequences of fool-hardy commerce. We allowed the credit industry to rise accounting for nearly half of all of U.S. Gross Domestic Product — tripling from 16% to 48% in the span of only 30 years. Most people don’t understand GDP much less what goes into computing it — which is governed by mostly political decisions (a fact pointed out 50 years ago by Ludwig von Mises, in his Theory of Money and Credit).

The rise of “financial services” is merely a reflection of the fact that we have allowed Banks to insert themselves into everything we do and every financial decision we make. That the beneficiaries of this policy were the principals, traders and managers on Wall Street is easily apparent now — because median wages for everyone else stagnated in real dollar terms and went down when you include the new costs, taxes, and expenses of just living. The main new costs were credit and medical care — fueled by Banks funding those costs with the savings and pensions of the same people who are demanding the benefit from their forced “investment.” Instead of controlling costs by putting Banks and their emissaries as intermediaries between services and the consumption of those services, it merely added many layers of corporate bureaucracy and many layers of profit for those intermediaries — essentially creating a private tax with no apparent benefit to the country or to the people.

The way the Banks did it is with the issuance of “private currency” nominal derivatives carrying a notional value of more than $600 trillion, which is more than 12 times all the real money in the world. People are taking to the streets because they understand that there is not enough money in the world, literally, to pay for the Banks excesses, that there is no way to recover without taking power away from the Banks and those who serve the Banks in the corridors of power, — and mostly because they refuse to be passive partners in a system that takes their own money and uses it against them.

The foreclosure crisis is a symptom of the larger problem of excess Bank power and excess wealth siphoned away from the people of the planet. With unstoppable greed, they have jettisoned the self restraint that they said was sufficient to avoid this type of crisis, thus convincing the public and the regulatory agencies and the government law-makers that outside regulation was not needed. It was enough they said to have the threat of outside regulation and enough to rely on self-imposed restraint to avoid collapse.

The only thing that the protesters agree with Wall Street is on the word “enough.” They have had enough of this double-talk and they want their fair share of the pie they created with their savings, their pension plans, their homes and everything else of value that is now a basis for charging interest and making a profit in exchanging paper. A real GDP comprised not of “financial services” (trading paper back and forth between the same parties) but rather in performing real work, which is what the 99% do every day, is the only path to recovery. The people know it and they are going to demand it. Whether they get it or not, depends upon whether you show up at the events near you.

Protesters Take to Streets; Clashes in Rome

By RACHEL DONADIO and ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

ROME — In dozens of cities around the world on Saturday, people took to the streets, clutching placards and chanting slogans as part of a planned day of protests against the financial system.

In Rome, a protest thick with tension spread over several miles. Protesters set fire to at least one building and clashed violently with the police, who responded with water cannons and tear gas.

In other European cities, including Berlin and London, the demonstrations were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and many gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Elsewhere, the turnout was more modest, but rallies of a few hundred people were held in several cities, including Sydney, Australia, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Protests were also held in New York and several other cities in the United States and Canada.

But just as the rallies in New York have represented a variety of messages — signs have been held in opposition to President Obama yards away from signs in support — so Saturday’s protests contained a grab bag of messages, opposing nuclear power, political corruption and the privatization of water.

Despite the difference in language, landscape and scale, the protests were united in frustration with the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

“I have no problem with capitalism. I have no problem with a market economy. But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical,” Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin. “We shouldn’t bail out the banks. We should bail out the people.”

Another protester in Berlin, Katja Simke, 31, said that it was clear “that something has to be done.”

“This isn’t a single movement but a network of different groups,” said Ms. Simke, who was opposed to income inequality but also cared about climate change and atomic energy. “I’m really positively surprised by how well this came together.”

Saturday’s protests sprang from demonstrations in Spain in May and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began last month in New York. This weekend, the global show of force came as finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations meet in Paris to discuss global economic issues, including ways to tackle Europe’s sovereign debt crisis

In London, where crowds assembled in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the ubiquitous emblems of the movement were in evidence. “Bankers Are the Real Looters” and “We Are the 99 Percent,” read several placards and flags. One demonstrator, dressed as Jesus Christ, held a sign that said “I Threw the Money Lenders Out for a Reason,” a reference to an episode from the Bible.

Brief clashes were reported in London, where police were out in force with dozens of riot vans, canine units and hundreds of officers. But the gathering was largely peaceful, with a picnic atmosphere and people streaming in and out of a nearby Starbucks.

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an appearance at the cathedral and was met by hundreds of cheering fans, and was virtually borne aloft to the church steps, where he called the movement “the culmination of a dream.”

In Rome, Saturday’s protests were as much about the growing dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — who narrowly survived a vote of confidence on Friday — as they were was about global financial inequities.

“We’re upset because we don’t have prospects for the future,” Alessia Tridici, 18, said in Rome. “We’ll never see a pension. We’ll have to work until we die.”

In contrast, protests in Berlin remained peaceful and upbeat, with music and even a little dancing on a warm, sunny day.

“I like the carnival atmosphere,” said Juhani Seppovaara, 64, a photographer and writer originally from Finland now living in Berlin. “But for me there’s a little too much populism, very complicated matters reduced to one or two sentences.”

In Sydney, several hundred protesters carried signs with slogans including “We Are the 99%” and “Capitalism Is Killing our Economy.” The atmosphere was lively, with a brass band providing music in packed Art Deco-style public thoroughfares outside the headquarters of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the city’s financial district.

In central Tokyo, where periodic rallies against nuclear power have been held since the March accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, about 300 protesters marched with signs through busy streets and heavy traffic, chanting “We’re With Occupy Wall Street!” “Down With the Rich!” and “No More Nukes!”

Two young men held a banner that expressed a somewhat apologetic solidarity: “Radioactivity Has No Borders. To the World From Japan: Sorry!” Another held a sign that read simply, “Let’s Complain More.”

“Even timid Japanese are finally starting to push for change,” said Miku Ohkura, 24, a college student in Tokyo, who said she had already been to about a half dozen protests for various causes in the last few months. She said that apart from being opposed to nuclear power, younger people were angry at being made to bear the brunt of Japan’s economic woes, with many unemployed or too poor to start families. “We all have different messages, but we’re all alike in that we want society to become more equal,” she said.

In Hong Kong, about 200 people rallied at Exchange Square, an open area near the International Finance Center, in the heart of the city’s banking and commerce district. Various groups staged sit-ins, protesting issues including growing income disparity and a political system that some demonstrators said was undemocratic.

Thousands of people protested in Hong Kong in March, criticizing the government then for not doing enough to help the poor. A far larger crowd marched through downtown Hong Kong on July 1, the anniversary of the territory’s return to China, over the widening income gap.

A 2009 report by the United Nations Development Report found Hong Kong had the greatest income disparity of the 38 developed economies it studied.

“It’s just embarrassing,” said Nury Vittachi, a Hong Kong resident who attended Saturday’s rally. The Hong Kong government likes to stress stability and prosperity, Mr. Vittachi said, but a widening wealth gap threatens those ideals.

“We’ve had decades of increasing inequality, culminating in the financial crisis,” said Jack Copley, 20, a student at the University of Birmingham who was protesting in London. “The best we can hope for,” he said, gesturing to the gathered crowd, “is that we can change the political climate to make it harder for politicians to rule in the interests of the few.”

Rachel Donadio reported from Rome, and Elizabeth A. Harris from New York. Reporting was contributed by Kevin Drew from Hong Kong, Nicholas Kulish from Berlin, Matt Siegel from Sydney, Australia, Ravi Somaiya from London, and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Occupy wall Street, protests, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 30 Comments »

CONTAMINATED COLLATERAL: THE ACHILLES HEEL FOR BANKERS

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

WAIT FOR ARMAGEDDON OR PREVENT IT?

“Thus a decision awaits us which is more a matter of timing than substance. The system is going to collapse in its current form because it is and always was a pyramid scheme. They all fail every time. The question is when. So the only question that remains is whether we will assert ourselves now and start building from within, or pass the opportunity and try to arise from the rubble of what remains when this pyramid collapses under its own weight. Or, put another way, do we want to be the Phoenix that rises out of its own ashes, or the falcon that does what is practical to stay alive and bring home dinner? It seems that the Occupyers have that answer — do it now!” NEIL F GARFIELD, LIVINGLIES.ME

THE BIGGER THE LIE, THE HARDER THE FALL

EDITOR’S NOTE: The simple fact is that they don’t have any collateral in most instances and their assets are accordingly grossly overstated on their balance sheet. And the fact remains, no matter how they try to spin it, that Wall Street simply dipped into the pockets of people’s savings, pensions and taxes, pretended the money was their own, and then convinced people to borrow their own retirement money in ways that could never be paid.Now they claim to be creditors to whom the debt is owed even though the money came from the very person they claiming owes them still more money. And they are getting paid very well to assume this position while the average person of even substantial means is being ordered to “assume the position” to take it again.

With credit card interest at 20%-30%, private student loans going to 18%, and home equity being an irresistible target for Wall Street game players, people are now left without any meaningful amount of savings, a decrease in the amount of their pension plans, and a nearly permanent block to ever getting out of debt. And Wall Street is still successfully positioning itself as the injured party to whom the debt is owed. According to them, the Occupyers just lack the sophistication to understand why the Banks are not at fault for anything.

In truth our reliance on self-governance by Wall Street was misplaced the moment we allowed them to go public and transfer the risk to the public. In the end the people always get the shaft no matter which way they turn and no matter which “class”they think they are in. Each person is getting shafted by the Banks under the current infrastructure regardless of whether they think of themselves as an investor, a consumer, a creditor or a debtor.

The collateral claimed by banks is irretrievably broken by their own intervention in the chain of title. But the really pernicious quality of this mess is that people are under the gun by virtue of debt that was forced upon them using their own money. The cost of servicing that debt that steadily increased just as wages stagnated. But by “giving” people the money to buy things, the banks created the appearance of real commerce. In reality most of the commerce was built on debt — but the other side of the equation is never mentioned. The debt arose not just because someone borrowed money but also because someone loaned the money. And the parties who loaned the money were and remain the people themselves who, as a class of taxpayers, savers and pensioners, are the same on BOTH SIDES OF EVERY TRANSACTION.

If you ask the average 401k person whether he would have taken money out to purchase something, their answer is almost always negative. Yet placed in the hands of money managers who were institutional investors, these same people in fact did borrow the money indirectly without any knowledge of what place they held in the securitization hierarchy. They were dead last. As the source of the funds, they had a sure loss coming eventually whether it was a mortgage, credit card, or student loan debt. Then, encouraged by promises of never-ending replacement loans, they accepted loan products that were unworkable. The result is that they have no money to pay their debt because their own money was used to create the debt and now of course that money is gone — into the pockets of Bankers as fees and profits — they are guaranteed to have diminished capacity to pay off the debt.

Bankers always resist regulation. And “free market” believers are drawn into the narrative by ideology and the mistaken factual belief that the lenders, as a class and the borrowers, as a class, are not one and the same. Ask one of these bankers or “free market” enthusiasts whether Wall Street should be allowed unlimited access into the pension funds and taxpayer funds to lend people their own money, raking off absurd profits, and they would probably not be able to sustain any argument against regulation. To be sure, in the interest of financial liquidity, the function of Wall Street has a value and they should be paid for their services — a real amount based upon real service.

The problem arose when through deregulation the goal of liquidity became the only goal. That is why, in the absence of regulation, courtesy of legislation passed in 1998, Wall Street was the only one at the table who could pursue self-interest. Everyone else had to go through their gate if they wanted to do anything. And so they were allowed to issue private currency in a very public way, drawing upon funds from hardworking people who had earned the pensions that awaited them and then, in pursing their interests for ever increasing profits and fees, produced a stupid amount of liquidity that exceeded real money issued by all the governments around the world. They didn’t just exceed it. They issued 12 times the amount of real money in the world.

Now in order to make the profits they intended, they are demanding that taxpayer money be used to cover the profits and fees they think they earned. Every time we do that the taxpayer is paying another dollar toward pornographic profits, salaries and bonuses on Wall Street, while our lives, our infrastructure and our prospects crumble under the weight of a financial infrastructure that must collapse at some point because there literally is not enough money in the world to cover the paper issued by Wall Street.

Thus a decision awaits us which is more a matter of timing than substance. The system is going to collapse in its current form because it is and always was a pyramid scheme. They all fail every time. The question is when. So the only question that remains is whether we will assert ourselves now and start building from within, or pass the opportunity and try to arise from the rubble of what remains when this pyramid collapses under its own weight. Or, put another way, do we want to be the Phoenix that rises out of its own ashes, or the falcon that does what is practical to stay alive and bring home dinner? It seems that the Occupyers have that answer — do it now!

Behold the dangers of contaminated collateral [updated]

Posted by John McDermotton Oct 10 22:06.

Yale University’s Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordoñez have a new working paper out on the role of collateral in financial crises. This may not pass for exciting news in some places but FT Alphaville is not like other places. Gorton is renowned for his work on shadow banking and wrote an excellent short primer on the recent crisis.

(Update: He’s also, as our commenters point out, the man behind some of the AIG’s risk-management models. Take that as you will, we still think there are some interesting insights in the paper.)

The paper, “Collateral Crises”, uses complicated mathematics we don’t ~~understand~~ want to discuss at this point. But don’t let that put you off: it has some important insights for those interested in the role of information and collateral in the financial system.

First, a very important caveat: the below refers to a model. The empirical evidence presented in the paper is labelled “Very Preliminary and Incomplete” so consider the ideas below as educated musings rather than empirical statements.

The hypothesis is a neat one and although the authors readily admit it’s just one way of looking at recent troubles, it’s an interesting way of thinking about how the crisis hit when it hit.

The argument runs something like this: short-term private funding markets such as money markets or interbank markets work by dealing in “information-insensitive debt”. In other words, there’s buying and selling without anyone worried about adverse selection. Collateral is put down and — assuming it’s AAA — no questions are asked. These ideas have been suggested before (such as here) but this paper is the first to look at its macroeconomic implications.

In particular, it uses this micro model to explain how small shocks can translate into big events. To understand the professors’ logic it’s useful to grasp their version of financial crisis events (our emphasis):

Financial crises are hard to explain without resorting to large shocks. But, the recent crisis, for example, was not the result of a large shock. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) Report (2011) noted that with respect to subprime mortgages: ”Overall, for 2005 to 2007 vintage tranches of mortgage-backed securities originally rated triple-A, despite the mass downgrades, only about 10% of Alt-A and 4% of subprime securities had been ’materially impaired’-meaning that losses were imminent or had already been suffered-by the end of 2009” (p. 228-29). Park (2011) calculates the realized principal losses on the $1.9 trillion of AAA/Aaa-rated subprime bonds issued between 2004 and 2007 to be 17 basis points as of February 2011. The subprime shock was not large. But, the crisis was large…

The authors hypothesise that when these types of collateral markets exist, no useful information is created because it’s too costly (at least for market participants in the short-term) to do so. Thus there’s no information that can help one distinguish between good and bad collateral — between Scandinavian government bonds, say, and AAA-rated sub-prime mortgage bonds.

Indeed, there’s more consumption and lending when there are no questions asked. The longer the boom continues, the more ignorance percolates and bad collateral gets into the system.

When information is not produced and the perceived quality of collateral is high enough, ﬁrms with good collateral can borrow, but in addition some ﬁrms with bad collateral can borrow. In fact, consumption is highest if there is never information production, because then all ﬁrms can borrow, regardless of their true collateral quality. The credit boom increases consumption because more and more ﬁrms receive 3ﬁnancing and produce output. In our setting opacity can dominate transparency and the economy can enjoy a blissful ignorance.

Here’s the problem. The bigger the lie, the harder the fall:

In this setting we introduce aggregate shocks that may decrease the perceived value of collateral in the economy. It is not the leverage per se that allows a small negative shock to have a large effect. The problem is that after a credit boom, in which more and more ﬁrms borrow with debt backed by collateral of unknown type (but with high perceived quality), a negative aggregate shock affects more collateral than the same aggregate shock would affect when the credit boom was shorter or if the value of collateral was known. Hence, the size of the downturn depends on how long debt has been information-insensitive in the past.

Gorton and Ordoñez are not rubbishing the importance of leverage — indeed they’re sort of talking about leveraged opacity. But their original argument is that the sub-prime shock was not large and not in itself the cause of the subsequent fall-out. It was the overall reduction in perceived quality of collateral.

A negative aggregate shock reduces the perceived quality of all collateral. This may or may not trigger information production. If, given the shock, households have an incentive to learn the true quality of the collateral, ﬁrms may prefer to cut back on the amount borrowed to avoid costly information production, a credit constraint. Alternatively, information may be produced, in which case only ﬁrms with good collateral can borrow. In either case, output declines because the short-term debt is not as effective as before the shock in providing funds to ﬁrms.

There’s a fair bit to critique here and not just to state the obvious point that credit rating agencies are supposed to provide the sort of information found useful by market participants. Leverage also probably does matter “per se”: it affects the pace in which margin calls come in and funding crises hit. Moreover any notion of intent is missing here — opacity serves some interests more than others.

Still, there are some interesting ideas here and we’ll be cockahoop to see some empirical evidence about the importance of not being able to separate good and bad collateral.

The big sort, rather than the big short.

Update II: Not for the first time, the comments section on an FT Alphaville post are more enlightening than the main text. Scroll down for more, and do contact rob2.7 if you can speak complex mathematics.

Related links:
Shadow banking – from Giffen goods to Triffin troubles – FT Alphaville
Regulating the shadow banking system – Marginal Revolution
Interview with Gary Gorton – Minneapolis Fed
Gary Gorton on Financial Crises – The Browser” href=”http://thebrowser.com/interviews/gary-gorton-on-financial-crises” target=”_blank”>Gary Gorton on Financial Crises – Five Books Interviews

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, collateral, collateralized debt obligation, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Occupy wall Street, protests, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 22 Comments »

PANIC AMONGST WALL STREET MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

“What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.” Paul Krugman

EDITOR’S COMMENT: If you are a member of the inner circle sitting on hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that you know you stole, you’ve got to be worried. The protests voiced by Occupy Wall Street are echoes of protests that began in Europe and the result has been worrisome for Wall Street titans.

Governments around the world are enacting reforms to calm an enraged citizenry, while the American public is just revving up the expression of long pent-up anger. Reforms are coming — and so are prosecutions of civil, administrative and even criminal actions. Just look at any new source and you’ll find that from Israeli parliament to Spain, Greece, and the United Kingdom, the movement is creating a form of self governance by the people, for the people and most importantly, of the people.

Change is coming — and it is not from Obama, or government initiative. It is from people who still know, deep in their hearts that they are the boss. Thomas Jefferson said that government only stands with the consent of the people. He was right. And while we have a remarkable document in the United States Constitution, the pattern of behavior has been to ignore the protections we adopted when the document was written and especially when the Bill of Rights was established. Remember that dusty 9th Amendment that nobody talks about — it reserves rights to the people in the final analysis.

If Government doesn’t take jurisdiction, the people will do it legally and constitutionally and they are doing exactly that — which means that the protection of bankers by buying off legislators, policy-makers and law enforcement is in grave danger of being lost to those Wall Street greed-pandering geniuses who started this mess, stole the public purse and now refuse to give back what they obtained through illegal means.

FINALLY, we have the people in power more scared of us than we are of them. In a Democracy, that is the way it should be.

October 9, 2011

Panic of the Plutocrats

By PAUL KRUGMAN

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

NY TIMES: PROTEST MESSAGE IS CLEAR BUT NOBODY IS LISTENING

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

“protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This Times editorial has it right. Washington law enforcement and regulators should be listening to the people and not the bankers. But even here, the Times refuses to address the essential problem that brought us to this brink: the banks’ manipulation of the housing market into nearly complete destruction, thus dragging the entire economy down, the prospects for employment dwindling, and the prospects for a better future bleak, at best. We must be willing to take on the banks, hold them to the rule of law, and that will stop the foreclosures, allow the housing market to at least start a recovery and take the heat off of an economy that can’t stand the pain.

October 8, 2011

Protesters Against Wall Street

As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.

The jobless rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.6 percent over the past year; for young high school graduates, the average is 21.6 percent. Those figures do not reflect graduates who are working but in low-paying jobs that do not even require diplomas. Such poor prospects in the early years of a career portend a lifetime of diminished prospects and lower earnings — the very definition of downward mobility.

The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.

Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.

When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal society. Before the recession, the share of income held by those in the top 1 percent of households was 23.5 percent, the highest since 1928 and more than double the 10 percent level of the late 1970s.

That share declined slightly as financial markets tanked in 2008, and updated data is not yet available, but inequality has almost certainly resurged. In the last few years, for instance, corporate profits (which flow largely to the wealthy) have reached their highest level as a share of the economy since 1950, while worker pay as a share of the economy is at its lowest point since the mid-1950s.

Income gains at the top would not be as worrisome as they are if the middle class and the poor were also gaining. But working-age households saw their real income decline in the first decade of this century. The recession and its aftermath have only accelerated the decline.

Research shows that such extreme inequality correlates to a host of ills, including lower levels of educational attainment, poorer health and less public investment. It also skews political power, because policy almost invariably reflects the views of upper-income Americans versus those of lower-income Americans.

No wonder then that Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for discontent. There are plenty of policy goals to address the grievances of the protesters — including lasting foreclosure relief, a financial transactions tax, greater legal protection for workers’ rights, and more progressive taxation. The country needs a shift in the emphasis of public policy from protecting the banks to fostering full employment, including public spending for job creation and development of a strong, long-term strategy to increase domestic manufacturing.

It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Occupy wall Street, protests, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 37 Comments »

OWLS ARE BEING HEARD: OCCUPY WALL STREET ENGAGES BANKERS WHO PUSH BACK WITH PEPPER SPRAY AND PITHY COMMENTS

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

EDITOR’S NOTE: OWLS (Occupy Wall Streeters) are expanding across the nation, money is pouring in and they are getting support from all sorts of unlikely sources. It is clear that Obama and his team are looking for ways to tap this energy as the unions see a vehicle for growth, Tea Party members see their cherished goal of banging the banks for TARP and the rest of the $16 trillion bailout, and young people are flocking to a cause that runs right into their empty pockets — jobs withheld from the American economy because big banks and big business are literally holding $3.5 TRILLION in money that normally would be flowing into the economy growing businesses that would hire and train American workers.

It doesn’t take a political strategist to see that this movement is what will define American politics and the 2012 elections. Anyone running for office needs to run against big business and big banks or they will lose, pure and simple. Pepper spray from hired thugs in new Jersey and peppery comments and whining from bankers “trying to make ends meet” are not going to stop this movement. This one is here to stay and it might just be the beginning of a new era of governance with the emergence of a centrist political party that eschews the ties and tactics of the republican party, a subsidiary of the banks, and the Democrats who have abandoned basic progressive principles that are practical. There is no party right now that can attract the enthusiasm of the young and old American voters like the OWLS.

Unless one party or the other adopts the energy, momentum and anger of the OWLS, this will result in a third party that will have candidates running in all major contested districts. It will draw heavily from disaffected Democrats and Republicans. It is a wild card that cannot be tamed. POLITICIANS: Proceed at your own risk!

The message is clear: Hold the Big Banks and Big Business accountable for what they have done to our government, our society and our economy. Bring the jobs back and grow those industries that will produce good paying jobs that pay enough for people to live and raise a family. It is not acceptable for the American society to give up hope, a future vision and our own ability to innovate because those who siphoned off the money won’t give it back. We want to see accountability, indictments, and restitution. We want capital put back in the economy from which it was stolen. The purse snatcher has been caught. It is time to pay the piper.

‘Occupy Wall Street’, 99 percent movements get challenge from the other 1 percent

Published: October 7

The “Occupy’”movement has spread from its New York birthplace to several other major cities, including Boston, Washington D.C. and L.A.. What protesters might not have expected was that the one percent of Americans that the protests are targeting would hit back. As Elizabeth Flock reported:

In a news conference yesterday, President Obama told the protesters of Occupy Wall Street he understood their concerns about the nation’s financial system, but also defended those who worked in the financial sector, saying their work was necessary for the economy to grow

It was the first time the focus had been shifted from the “We are the 99 percent” of people who have been protesting over corporate greed on Wall Street, among other issues, to the “one percent” of people they’re protesting.

As the “Occupy” movement continues to spread across the nation, the bankers who work on and around Wall Street have begun to speak up. Some have responded by telling protesters they aren’t so different from them, or started their own counter-protests. Others have said they just don’t care.

Exception Magazine reports that last night, self-identified Wall Street workers were seen wandering through Zuccotti Park during the General Assembly meeting to challenge attendees on why they had come to protest.

The two workers called out protesters for rallying against corporations while consuming products like designer clothes and iPads. They pointed out that most of the protesters clearly could afford to eat. And they echoed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s argument that some bankers are struggling to make ends meet, too.

New York Federal Reserve’s board of directors Kathryn Wylde agreed with the two wayward bankers, Public Radio International reports, saying recently that if the protesters actually “talked to the people working inside the banks and on Wall Street … they would find they have far more in common with them than what divides them.”

A counter-protest has also started on Wall Street, “Occupy Occupy Wall Street,” by two investment bankers who are fed up with the demonstrations.

In Washington, Occupy DC protesters took to the Metro to demonstrate on Friday, handing out fliers while posing as members of America’s one percent. As Katie Rogers explained:

Nearly a week into “Occupy DC” demonstrations and a day after protestors took to D.C.’s Freedom Plaza, the movement that Wall Street built is still attracting supporters.

Now, Metro riders may find members of America’s 99 percent clogging their daily commute.

A video posted on Occupy DC’s Web site shows a cluster of dressed-to-the-nines demonstrators posing as America’s 1 percent, brandishing an iPad, toasting champagne glasses and handing fliers to riders who mostly just look tired.

As political leaders begin to react to the growing protest movement, some analysts wonder if President Obama can tap into the movement’s energy. As Dana Milbank opined:

As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators moved to Washington on Thursday and swarmed outside the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, President Obama was at the other end of Lafayette Square trying to align himself with the swelling protest movement.

“I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street, and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place,” the president said at a news conference in the East Room.

For the struggling president, the nascent movement offers a chance at salvation, the opportunity to excite liberals with the sort of populist energy that has fueled the Tea Party for two years. But, as liberal leaders already know, the young movement must be careful to avoid Obama’s embrace: He decimated the progressive cause once, and he would do it again if given the chance.

Liberal activists who rallied behind Obama in 2008 watched as he defied their wishes and instead made unrequited concessions to the Republicans. “Every one in this crowd, I am certain, has had disappointments and frustrations with this White House,” Robert Borosage, a director of the Campaign for America’s Future, told the audience as he convened the Take Back the American Dream Conference, an annual gathering of liberal activists in Washington, this week. He accused Obama of being “too cautious” and “pre-compromised” and criticized his performance on jobs, global warming, defense and foreign policy.

Another of the speakers at the confab, former Obama White House official Van Jones, said it was liberals’ own fault for placing too much faith in the president. “We all affiliated [with] him,” he said. “We made a mistake.” Obama “got to become head of state, he got promoted — good for him,” said Jones, who was forced to quit the White House when conservative critics attacked him. “But here we are — and it’s worse than before.”

More from The Washington Post

Opinion: Rescuing America from Wall Street

Who are the 99 percent?

Russ Feingold endorses Occupy Wall Street

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Occupy wall Street, OWLS, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 59 Comments »

NY TIMES: LOUSY JOBS, NO JOBS, NO GOOD PROSPECTS

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Times Editorial hits the nail on the head, but uses the wrong hammer. Jobs and growth of the middle class is the only thing that will stand between us sustaining ourselves as a world power or becoming a banana republic. Jobs and growth are not magical concepts that suddenly happen when you waive a wand.

Jobs are created when businesses start and grow. Businesses start and grow with capital. Wall Street, directly or indirectly is holding $3.5 TRILLION hostage in its effort to force Obama from office while it starves the economy and literally takes food of the plates of tens of millions of Americans. The capital held by Wall Street is NOT the capital of Wall Street, it is the money stolen from other people that Wall Street is holding.

That money was stolen in the world’s largest financial fraud of all time — something that will remain unequaled for decades, perhaps hundreds of years. They did it with the sale of exotic instruments to investors, betting against those investments because they knew they had the power to torpedo the investments, and the tools of destruction were exotic mortgages where even the simplest looking transaction was based upon fraudulent appraisals, non-disclosure of important information required by law, and in particular using conduits as though they were lenders, thus achieving insulation from charges of predatory and fraudulent lending practices. In fact the entire mortgage mess was really just part of the larger scheme of the issuance of unregulated securities in fraudulent schemes to deprive investors, pension funds and homeowners of what little they had left to survive.

As with all crimes against society the only way to cover them up is with more fraud. More deception and more intimidation. So the paperwork is mostly fabricated, forged and unduly notarized documents pretending to attest to the authority and knowledge of signors. But the paperwork is a distraction from the fact that the the “mortgage” transactions were really part of the securities issuance. This actually makes the signing of the mortgage documents an integral part of the issuance of the mortgage bonds. That changes the character of the transaction and probably the laws that apply.

Applying existing laws without any changes to substantive law, procedure or the rules of evidence, the banks will lose, pure and simple. Every time a Judge takes a close look at some piece of paper that is

signed by “John Jones, as authorized signor (it doesn’t even say agent) [without any document showing agency authority],

on behalf of XYZ corporation, as attorney in fact (same defect),

as successor to ABC, as servicer (under a PSA in which the loan transfer requirements were never satisfied and therefore never completed),

for the DEF Trust (a non-existent trust that is actually a general partnership),

on behalf of JKL Corp. Trustee (a trustee of a Trust that never existed because it lacked the elements under New York State law to create a common law trust, and in which the powers of the trustee actually amount to nothing once you read the whole document purporting to describe the “trustee”)”

all out of the chain of title using some private system of keeping track of the owners thus depriving anyone of the knowledge as to who can sign a satisfaction of a mortgage that was obviously never perfected into a valid lien, even though ti was recorded —

every time the Judge really looks —- he/she decides this smells to high heaven and that the entire process is defective.

There is no lending institution in existence that would accept such a signature from an agent for a borrower.

That they accept it from each other as they treat the loan was though it was transferred even though it wasn’t is just a game without risk because nobody is paying anything for the loan and nobody funded the loan except the hapless pension fund whose money was taken for fees first and mortgage later.

Housing drives the economy directly and indirectly. So if we want to see a change we must bring the banks and big business to task, force them to act like good citizens and return the favor of special tax treatment and subsidies with growth money, start-up money and easier credit for consumers, who drive 70% of the economy. Ignore housing and you abandon hope of a solution. Ignore consumers and their jobs and earnings, and you have disrupted 70% of the economy with no prospects for improvement.

Somehow the banks continue to be heard on their spin that it is better to let them keep the proceeds from stealing the purse than to give it back to the consumers from whom they stole it. That is ending now with Occupy Wall Street. The OWLS are wise beyond their years.

More Bleak Job Numbers

It would take a lot of optimism to put a positive spin on the jobs report for September, released on Friday by the Labor Department.

Employers added 103,000 jobs last month, allaying fears, for now, of a double-dip recession. But even if the economy avoids another contraction, the numbers confirm that the job market is in a deep rut that is, for all purposes, indistinguishable from recession. There are still 14 million people officially unemployed, and nearly 12 million more who have given up actively looking for work or who are working part time but need full-time jobs.

Earlier this week, President Obama and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, delivered bleak economic assessments, which demand a government response. The economy, already at a crawl, could well slow down further in response to economic setbacks in Europe and China or to homegrown problems like political gridlock that delay spending on job-creation efforts.

The economy is not producing enough jobs, and many of the ones created are lousy. Much of last month’s job growth came as 45,000 striking Verizon employees returned to work. Without that one-time boost, the economy added only 58,000 new positions in September, roughly in line with the slow pace of job creation over the past several months.

That is not nearly enough to lower the unemployment rate, which is at 9.1 percent and is almost certain to rise in the months ahead, barring an unexpected upsurge in economic activity.

The new jobs are generally in lower-paying fields, like home health care, and in part-time and temporary employment. These kinds of employment may be better than no work, but they are generally not the types of jobs that allow workers to get ahead.

The September report also shows the permanent scars caused by persistent joblessness. The share of workers who have been unemployed for more than six months increased from 42.9 percent to 44.6 percent, near its record high from early last year. That is likely to translate into irreversible reductions in the standard of living for millions of Americans because the longer one is unemployed, the harder it becomes to find new work, especially at previous pay levels.

Children will be among those most harmed by the jobs crisis. The Economic Policy Institute, using data from the September report, has calculated that 278,000 teachers and other public school employees have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Over the same period, 48,000 new teaching jobs were needed to keep up with the increased enrollments but were never created. In all, public schools are now short 326,000 jobs.

At a time when more and better education is seen as crucial to economic dynamism and competitiveness, larger class sizes and fewer teachers are the last thing the nation needs. Staffing reductions also mean that schools are less able to respond to the needs of poor children, whose ranks have increased by 2.3 million from 2008 to 2010.

The situation calls out for swift passage of Mr. Obama’s jobs bill and even more far-reaching efforts to revive growth and employment. The alternative is lasting damage from a jobs crisis that has already done enormous harm to families and communities.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: bankruptcy, borrower, countrywide, disclosure, economy, foreclosure, foreclosure defense, foreclosure offense, foreclosures, fraud, housing, jobs, LOAN MODIFICATION, modification, Ny Times, Occupy wall Street, OWLS, quiet title, rescission, RESPA, securitization, TILA audit, trustee, WEISBAND | 9 Comments »

BANKS: LIGHTENING ROD FOR PUBLIC OUTRAGE – UNIONS JOIN IN

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

YOUNG PEOPLE JOINING IN THE MOVEMENT

EDITOR’S COMMENT: Finally the outrage has emerged against bank excess and bank control over the levers of power in Washington and State capitals. Long festering, it has erupted into an uncontrollable burst of energy and it will change the landscape of American politics, American finance and the American lifestyles.

October 5, 2011

Seeking Energy, Unions Join Protest Against Wall Street

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and CARA BUCKLEY

Stuart Appelbaum, an influential union leader in New York City, was in Tunisia last month, advising the fledgling labor movement there, when he received a flurry of phone calls and e-mails alerting him to the rumblings of something back home. Protesters united under a provocative name, Occupy Wall Street, were gathering in a Lower Manhattan park and raising issues long dear to organized labor.

And gaining attention for it.

Mr. Appelbaum recalled asking a colleague over the phone to find out who was behind Occupy Wall Street — a bunch of hippies or perhaps troublemakers? — and whether the movement might quickly fade.

So far, at least, it has not, and on Wednesday, several prominent unions, struggling to gain traction on their own, made their first effort to join forces with Occupy Wall Street. Thousands of union members marched with the protesters from Foley Square to their encampment in nearby Zuccotti Park.

“The labor movement needs to tap into the energy and learn from them,” Mr. Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said. “They are reaching a lot of people and exciting a lot of people that the labor movement has been struggling to reach for years.”

In fact, the unexpected success of Occupy Wall Street in leveling criticism of corporate America has stirred some soul-searching among labor leaders. They have noted with envy that the new movement has done a far better job, not only of capturing interest, but also of attracting young people. Protests have spread to dozens of cities, including Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Several union leaders complained that their own protests over the past two years had received little attention, though they had put far more people on the streets than Occupy Wall Street has. A labor rally in Washington last October drew more than 100,000 people, with little news media coverage.

Behind the scenes in recent days, union leaders have debated how to respond to Occupy Wall Street. In internal discussions, some voiced worries that if labor were perceived as trying to co-opt the movement, it might alienate the protesters and touch off a backlash.

Others said they were wary of being embarrassed by the far-left activists in the group who have repeatedly denounced the United States government.

Those concerns may be renewed after a disturbance about 8 p.m. Wednesday as the march was breaking up. The police said they arrested eight protesters around the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, after people rushed barriers and began spilling into the street. While a couple of witnesses said that officers used pepper spray to clear the streets, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that one officer “possibly” used it. Several protesters were also arrested at State and Bridge Streets at 9:30 p.m.; the police said one protester was charged with assault after an officer was knocked off his scooter.

Despite questions about the protesters’ hostility to the authorities, many union leaders have decided to embrace Occupy Wall Street. On Wednesday, for example, members of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s executive council had a conference call in which they expressed unanimous support for the protest. One A.F.L.-C.I.O. official said leaders had heard from local union members wondering why organized labor was absent.

The two movements may be markedly different, but union leaders maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature.

The labor leaders said they hoped Occupy Wall Street would serve as a counterweight to the Tea Party and help pressure President Obama and Congress to focus on job creation and other concerns important to unions.

“This is very much a crystallizing moment,” said Denise Mitchell, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s communications director. “We have to look for sparks wherever they are. It could be an opportunity to talk about what’s wrong with the system and how to make it better.”

Still, it may not be easy for organized labor to mesh with this new movement. Labor unions generally represent older workers, while the Occupy Wall Street protesters are younger. Unions are hierarchical, while the Occupy Wall Street protesters are more loosely knit and like to see themselves as highly democratic.

Unions invariably have a long and specific list of demands, while Occupy Wall Street has not articulated formal ones. Union leaders often like the limelight, while Occupy Wall Street is largely leaderless.

“Labor’s needed a way to excite younger people with their message,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, said. “And to the extent that Occupy Wall Street’s ‘99 percent versus 1 percent’ theme goes along with what labor has been saying for a while, it’s a natural fit.”

“But obviously,” said Professor Kazin, who has written several books on populist and progressive movements, “demographically, there may be some problems here. The protests haven’t gotten much institutional presence, and if labor can help give them institutional presence, that can really help them.”

Several major labor groups — including the Transport Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union, the United Federation of Teachers and the United Auto Workers — took part in the march on Wednesday. Some more traditionally conservative ones, like those in the construction trades, stayed away.

George White, 60, a retired union member who lives in Marine Park, Brooklyn, said it was up to the young protesters to champion bread-and-butter issues in the future. “Unions are on the way out,” he said. “These are the children of mothers and fathers who have worked hard all their lives and now can’t put food on the tables. These are the children who can’t pay off their loans, who have nowhere to go and no opportunities.”

Julie Fry, 32, a lawyer who is a member of the union at the Legal Aid Society, said labor’s backing of the protest was momentous, and born out of frustration.

“We’re so fed up and getting nowhere through the old political structures that there needs to be old-fashioned rage in the streets,” she said.

Before the march, protesters at the Occupy Wall Street encampment’s welcome table said that while the unions were welcome, they would be only one more base of support.

“The idea that the unions will take over the crowd, that’s not going to happen,” said Jeff Smith, 41, a freelancer in advertising who has been on the welcome committee since the protests began. “We are not a group looking for a leader.”

Others expressed frustration with the unions. Chris Cicala, 26, from Staten Island, said his father, a union painter, had been laid off, leaving his family without health insurance. “I don’t get where the unions have been for the past 10 years,” Mr. Cicala said.

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Joseph Goldstein, Rob Harris and Colin Moynihan.

Wall St. Protest Attracts Many New to This Sort of Thing

FINALLY: HERE COMES THE OUTRAGE — 700 Arrested

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Neil Garfield

MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION ANALYSIS – CLICK HERE

EDITOR’S COMMENT: The media treated it as a joke, but now the Occupy Wall Street movement is obviously far larger than the “200 or so” protestors” previously reported, since they now admit that 700 were arrested. Similar actions are springing up around the country — people fed up with the banks that control the levers of power in Washington and State Capitals. The precedent for these protests began in other places around the world where the people are not nearly as afraid of their government as they are in this country. The response is predictable: change from politicians who want to keep their jobs.

The protest is peaceful and it is organized and contrary to the opinions of some pundits, the message is pretty clear — hold the megabanks accountable for what they did to the financial systems, to homeowners around the world (similar protests are rising in Greece, Spain and Hungary), to investors around the world who still don’t know exactly what hit them (because they get their information from the same banks that stole their purse), for what they did to our government, our budgets and our society.

How interesting it is that they were ignored when it did not appear to be getting much traction. And now that the traction is apparent, they are getting arrested. I can’t predict how far this will go, but I CAN say how deep and wide this discontent has spread. I speak to people of every political view, every ideology, and every religious belief. I speak to people who still think that a debt is a debt and should be paid.

And of course mostly I speak with people who were hit, just as the investors were hit, by a bus carrying Wall Street fat cats on their way to their electronic bank accounts where the money from the bailout, insurance, and the proceeds from other “credit enhancements’ is resting comfortably “off balance sheet” while the rest of us suffer from the consequences of their unaccountable atrocities.

The most common thread amongst all the people I speak with is the feeling that what Wall Street did was worse than any terrorist attack we have suffered. People from other countries consider what this country’s government did to have been an attack on their societies. In other words, the mega banks are not just mistrusted, they are hated in a way that moves people to action. So I expect that more and more people are thinking about why they don’t have a job, why they are underemployed, why they need 2-3 incomes to survive, why their home is being taken away even though the debt was paid by exotic Wall Street maneuvers, and why their prospects are bleak.

As in past historic cycles and changes, the need for change is always expressed by the collective voice of its people who do not allow different political ideologies to thwart them from joining forces against a common enemy. The arguments over ideology can wait for a time when society is back to normal nuances in opinion as to social issues. In the meantime, it is time for action and the Wall Street Occupation is one manifestation of that transcendent moment when the efforts to divide us fail and we throw the bums out.

Police Arrest More Than 700 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge

By AL BAKER, COLIN MOYNIHAN and SARAH MASLIN NIR

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Marchers claimed a roadway on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Updated, 1:23 p.m. Sunday | In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.

The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action.

“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, said. “Those who took over the Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”

But many protesters said they believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting after hundreds had entered.

“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street who marched but was not arrested.

A video on the YouTube page of a group called We Are Change shows some of the arrests.

Around 1 a.m., the first of the protesters held at the Midtown North Precinct on West 54th Street were released. They were met with cheers from about a half-dozen supporters who said they had been waiting as a show of solidarity since 6 p.m. for around 75 people they believed were held there. Every 10 to 15 minutes, they trickled out into a night far chillier than the afternoon on the bridge, each clutching several thin slips of paper — their summonses, for violations like disorderly conduct and blocking vehicular traffic. The first words many spoke made the group laugh: all variations on “I need a cigarette.”

David Gutkin, 24, a Ph.D. student in musicology at Columbia University, was among the first released. He said that after being corralled and arrested on the bridge, he was put into plastic handcuffs and moved to what appeared to be a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus, along with dozens of other protesters, for over four hours. They headed first into Brooklyn and then to several locations in Manhattan before arriving at the 54th Street precinct.

Men and women had been held separately, two or three to a cell. A few said they had been zip-tied the entire time. “We sang ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ ” said Annie Day, 34, who when asked her profession said, “I’m a revolutionary.” Ms. Day was wearing laceless Converse sneakers: police had required the removal of all laces as well as her belt. She rethreaded them on the pavement while a man who identified himself as a lawyer took each newly freed person’s name.

None of the protesters interviewed knew if the bridge march was planned or a spontaneous decision by the crowd. But all insisted that the police had made no mention that the roadway was off limits. Ms. Day and several others said that police officers had walked beside the crowd until the group reached about midway, then without warning began to corral the protesters behind orange nets.

Brett Wolfson-Stofko, center, ran through a line of cheering supporters after being released from the Midtown South Precinct in Manhattan.

Sarah Maslin Nir for The New York TimesBrett Wolfson-Stofko, center, ran through a line of cheering supporters after being released from the Midtown South Precinct in Manhattan.

The scene outside the Midtown South Precinct on West 35th Street around 2 a.m. was far more jovial. Only about 15 of the rumored 57 people had been released, but about a dozen waiting supporters danced jigs in the street to keep warm. They snacked on pizza. One even drank Coors Light beer, stashing the empty bottles under a parked police van. When a fresh protester was released, he or she ran through a gantlet formed by the waiting group, like a football player bursting onto the field during the Super Bowl. “This is so much better than prison!” one cheered.

“It’s cold,” said Rebecca Solow, 27, rubbing her arms as she waited on the sidewalk, “but every time one is released, it warms you up.”

The march on the bridge had come to a head shortly after 4 p.m., as the 1,500 or so marchers reached the foot of the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the bridge, just east of City Hall.

In their march north from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan — headquarters for the last two weeks of a protest movement against what demonstrators call inequities in the economic system — they had stayed on the sidewalks, forming a long column of humanity penned in by officers on scooters.

Where the entrance to the bridge narrowed their path, some marchers, including organizers, stuck to the generally agreed-upon route and headed up onto the wooden walkway that runs between and about 15 feet above the bridge’s traffic lanes.

But about 20 others headed for the Brooklyn-bound roadway, said Christopher T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who accompanied the march. Some of them chanted “take the bridge.” They were met by a handful of high-level police supervisors, who blocked the way and announced repeatedly through bullhorns that the marchers were blocking the roadway and that if they continued to do so, they would be subject to arrest.

There were no physical barriers, though, and at one point, the marchers began walking up the roadway with the police commanders in front of them – seeming, from a distance, as if they were leading the way. The Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, and a horde of other white-shirted commanders, were among them.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesPolice secured some protesters’ hands with plastic ties.

After allowing the protesters to walk about a third of the way to Brooklyn, the police then cut the marchers off and surrounded them with orange nets on both sides, trapping hundreds of people, said Mr. Dunn. As protesters at times chanted “white shirts, white shirts,” officers began making arrests, at one point plunging briefly into the crowd to grab a man.

The police said that those arrested were taken to several police stations and were being charged with disorderly conduct, at a minimum. A police spokesman said some protesters — mostly those without identification — were still “going through the system” late Sunday morning.

A freelance reporter for The New York Times, Natasha Lennard, was among those arrested. She was later released.

Mr. Dunn said only people at the very front could hear the warning, and he was concerned that those in the back “would have had no idea that it was not O.K. to walk on the roadway of the bridge.” Mr. Browne said that people who were in the rear of the crowd that may not have heard the warnings were not arrested and were free to leave.

Earlier in the afternoon, as many as 10 Department of Correction buses, big enough to hold 20 prisoners apiece, had been dispatched from Rikers Island in what one law enforcement official said was “a planned move on the protesters.”

Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway, said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the protesters to claim the road. “They weren’t pushed back,” he said. “It seemed that they moved at the same time.”

Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman saying ‘don’t do this’.”

He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be safe.” He left the bridge when he saw officers unrolling the nets as they prepared to make arrests. Many others who had been on the roadway were allowed to walk back down to Manhattan.

Mr. Browne said that the police did not trick the protesters into going onto the bridge.

“This was not a trap,” he said. “They were warned not to proceed.”

In related protests elsewhere in the country, 25 people were arrested in Boston for trespassing while protesting Bank of America’s foreclosure practices, according to Eddy Chrispin, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department. The protesters were on the grounds and blocking the entrance to the building, Mr. Chrispin said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking briefly before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade in Manhattan on Sunday, also defended the police’s actions.

“The police did exactly what they were supposed to do,” the mayor said, noting that those who march without the city’s permission would continue to get summonses. “It’s very easy to get a permit,” he added.

As the morning wore on, Zuccotti Park had the hallmarks of Sundays the world over. There was brunch: someone had donated bagels and lox. There was the morning paper: protesters who had camped for the night read the self-published newspaper “The Occupied Wall Street Journal,” some snuggled the metallic blankets usually worn by marathon runners. One man brushed his teeth without water, standing up.

The scene was largely quiet, save a man in a fedora freestyle rapping with drummers in the east corner of the park. Many of those who had been arrested returned at about 3 a.m. to a heroes reception, said Rick DeVoe, 54, from East Hampton, Mass. They were sleeping in.

“It’s not always at a fever pitch,” Mr. DeVoe said. “It’s not easy sleeping out, it’s not easy going to jail.”

Quiet political discussions continued around the sleepers. One woman gave a pep talk to what looked like a new recruit. “It’s about taking down systems, it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting,” she said. “Just protest.”

Some tourists wandered in between the makeshift beds and volunteers sweeping up cigarette butts. A man visiting from Virginia and his 4-year-old son snapped photos, as did an elderly couple passing through.

Natasha Lennard, William K. Rashbaum and Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

Pages

Spread the word

Like this:

Spread the word

Like this:

Spread the word

Like this:

Spread the word

Like this:

CUSTOMER SERVICE 520-405-1688

Big Five Banks larger than before crisis, bailout

Spread the word

Like this:

Spread the word

Like this:

The Fattest or the Fittest?

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Spread the word

Like this:

Occupy Protests Spread Anti-Foreclosure Message During National ‘Occupy Our Homes’ Action

Spread the word

Like this:

Greater Depression Hidden from View

Mass Manipulation through Propaganda

The Dream is Gone

Spread the word

Like this:

Spread the word

Like this:

10 Reasons Bank of America Is the Most Hated Bank in America

Spread the word

Like this:

Buoyed by Wall St. Protests, Rallies Sweep the Globe

By CARA BUCKLEY and RACHEL DONADIO

Spread the word

Like this:

Show up today at noon at Cesar Chavez Plaza, 201 W. Washington St., for what could be the first day of a prolonged assembly, following the path of ongoing Occupy demonstrations in New York and other cities.

Protests Against Banks Rise in Number and Intensity in Major Cities Around the Globe

Protesters Take to Streets; Clashes in Rome

By RACHEL DONADIO and ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

Spread the word

Like this:

WAIT FOR ARMAGEDDON OR PREVENT IT?

Behold the dangers of contaminated collateral [updated]

Here’s the problem. The bigger the lie, the harder the fall:

Spread the word

Like this:

Panic of the Plutocrats

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Spread the word

Like this:

Protesters Against Wall Street

Spread the word

Like this:

‘Occupy Wall Street’, 99 percent movements get challenge from the other 1 percent

Published: October 7

Spread the word

Like this:

More Bleak Job Numbers

Spread the word

Like this:

YOUNG PEOPLE JOINING IN THE MOVEMENT

Seeking Energy, Unions Join Protest Against Wall Street

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and CARA BUCKLEY

Spread the word

Like this:

Police Arrest More Than 700 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Spread the word

Like this:

Living Lies Services

Follow LivingLies Blog

Recent Posts

1 Links to Related External Sites