I was just thinking about TO HELL AND BACK, the story of World War II hero Audie Murphy. My friend Bill Norton, who wrote and directed TOUR OF DUTY wants to remake the movie, but from a different perspective. Murphy came back to the states a war hero, and turned that into a successful movie career. But Bill told me that Murphy came home suffering from shell shock and survivor's guilt, and that Murphy had to relive his heroic exploits, with the explosions and all of it, for the movies. I didn't know that part of the story, and how it drove him nuts.
Today I mentioned it to someone, and they informed me that a similar thing had happened to Sergeant Alvin York, the World War I hero, and recipient of the United States Medal of Honor, Italian Croce di Guerra, French Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. Later, my 12 year old boy John asked me if I knew who the biggest hero of World War II was. I told him that the most famous ones I knew about were Audie Murphy and Commando Kelly. Kelly was the first enlisted man to be decorated with the Medal of Honor for action on the European continent. My son looked up Kelly on the internet, and we discovered that Kelly had suffered a similar fate as Murphy and York.
Kelly came home to America and made enough money from Hollywood to open a gas station, but his wife was diagnosed with cancer, his insurance would not cover the costs, and the medical bills resulted in Kelly losing his home in foreclosure. He had a tough life, eventually dying of liver failure due to alcoholism.
America needs to improve the benefits and the physical and mental health care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It needs an honest single payer healthcare option to safeguard American veterans from going bankrupt due to medical bills and catastrophic illness. Now, people are wondering what to do with the glut in housing, the millions of empty homes in America, vacated by families, including the families of veterans, who are being gobbled up by our monopoly banks. Out of the millions of homes in foreclosure due to bank sleight of hand, Bank of America, for instance, contrary to their well disseminated rhetoric, has only made 98 permanent loan modifications in California as of the date of this article. I am stunned and outraged that there has been nothing tangible done to make those families whole, other than government funding for increased bureaucracy and counseling.
NEW HOMES DEMOLISHED BY A BANK THAT RECEIVED BAILOUT FUNDS
AUGMENTING THE G.I. BILL FOR VETERANS OF OUR ARMED SERVICES
For the first time in history, the monopoly banks, led by the largest mortgage holder in the world, Bank of America, own more residential real estate than homeowners. As a temporary measure, to reduce the glut in lender owned housing, the G.I. Bill should be augmented to increase the government's down payment for veterans purchasing homes, to fifty percent of the purchase price, and if elected I am prepared to write such a bill.
July 1, 2011
Congress continues to receive reports of extreme deficiencies in the treatment of our soldiers returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continual, aggressive oversight must be implemented to research and correct issues regarding the condition of facilities, staffing at hospitals, disability evaluations and future physical and mental healthcare.
ELIMINATE THE LEGISLATURE'S CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
June 29, 2011
Vince Flaherty believes that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the American people when it comes to the wishes of special interest groups and lobbyists representing the world's largest corporations headed up by dirty energy companies and monopoly banks. He believes that Wall Street and the Banking industry have hijacked our federal government in Washington D.C., as well as the state and local governments and judicial systems, and that the majority of our legislators, while putting on a good show of fairness regarding issues of less fundamental importance, have either ignored or exacerbated the problem. Disappointingly, our politicians and judges appear utterly powerless to stand in opposition to the selling out of America and remain in office or look forward to a lucrative retirement at the same time. As such, he is an advocate for the creation of a public financing system for congressional elections, a Clean Money and Elections Act that would create a comprehensive, voluntary system whereby candidates could successfully fund their own campaigns without bribes or intimidation from private contributors.
GREATER TRANSPARENCY IN ELECTORAL PROCESSES AND IN CREATION OF ELECTORATES
May 20, 2011
The office of the Secretary of State did not certify Vince as an official candidate until May 4, 2011, too late to be on the ballot, and too late to be eligible for the scheduled debates, which is not to infer he was deliberately shut out, but neither is it to say that public officials don’t do something intelligent sometimes. Miraculously however, a group funded by Californians against Citizens United in conjunction with Vince's staff, booked the Ritz Carlton in Marina Del Rey, and organized one last forum on the eve of the election, so that candidates who had not been afforded a voice could be intoduced to the public. Unfortunately, the Ritz soon cancelled the venue citing that there was a mix up and the room was scheduled for maintenance. Subsequent bookings at the Marina Del Rey Hotel, Jamaica, Bay Inn and the Marina International Hotel similarly vaporized. It seemed as if the whole unexpected debate was going to evaporate, as mysteriously as it had appeared, until the owners of a yacht named the Odyessy called up to graciously donate their boat for the debate in which all the candidates (except the two scheduled by the big guns to win the primary) participated. Thereafter, in attempting to get the debate aired, one of Vince's people was told by the president of NBC that there was no viewer interest in "local politics". Read what really happened in this important election, dominated by the red and blue political machine, the purple gang, right here.
LONG OVERDUE CONGRESSIONAL REFORMS: KEY POINTS
March 15, 2011
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators.
1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the following possible options:
(a) Two six year Senate terms, (b) Six two year House terms, (c) One six year Senate term and three two year House terms
2. No revolving doors: Legislators shall have a 5 or 10 year cooling off period between the time when they leave office, and when they can become eligible to take positions or compensation from regulatory agencies, banks and big business. Conversely, no representatives from big finance, industry, the regulatory system, or large international or corporate interests shall proceed to be elected to the legislature without a 5 or 10 year cooling off period.
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security: Congress shall participate with the American people in the Social Security system. All funds in the Congressional retirement shall be moved into the Social Security system.
4. Congress shall purchase their own retirement plans just as all Americans.
5. Congress shall no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
6. Congress shall not have a separate health care system than that availble to the American people.
7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people.
HOW TO PUT A STOP TO THE CALIFORNIA AND WORLDWIDE ECONOMIC CRISIS
March 2, 2011
First, the Secondary Market is the financial engine that brought prosperity, hence demand, and then jobs back to the post World War II economy, and there will be no genuine economic peace unless it can be properly revived by the U.S. government backstopping its financial oversights, and instilling trust between its counterparties. That can only be done by the government scaling back the monopoly banks, and helping them to abandon perverse incentives. There are so many potential bank customers in the world today, that no bank, or cartel of banks, no matter how large, can serve a useful function unless it can repeatedly sell off the debt it holds, in the secondary market.
Second, the monopoly banks must be scaled back and the secondary market must be properly revived.
Third, the monopoly banks must be scaled back and the secondary market must be properly revived. Yes, you heard me right, and there are a few other things that can be done to bring it about faster.
Fourth, in order to stop the ongoing vicious cycle of financial deception, enslavement and destruction of people, and countries, the momentum of the snowballing economic collapse has to be stopped dead in its tracks, and this can be done by exercising the doctrine of eminent domain. As you probably know, the concept of eminent domain relates to the action of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent.
But eminent domain is a tool that can legally be applied to the negotiable instruments collateralizing that private property as well. In short, the government ought to seize all the fraudulently rated securitized notes that are currently in litigation or subject to litigation, and pay the holders of those securities the fair market price they would have otherwise not been able to receive. Then, the government, or a private entity sanctioned by the government, will offer the homeowners whose properties are tied to those obligations, a low and flexible interest rate, a fair mortgage, regardless of the damage that the banks caused to the borrower’s credit scores by trapping them in unsustainable loans. Further, consideration and flexibility will be afforded to all homeowners who wish to retain homeownership and are able to demonstrate the ability to get back into the game of democracy and pitch!
Fifth, lowering taxes by ten percent across the board would ensure an economic recovery that will endure.
Sixth, since the owners of corporations convinced a few justices on the Supreme Court that they have the same rights as people when it comes to donating proportionately huge amounts of cash to their political puppets, they will henceforth have to pay their taxes too, just like the other people... But lowered by ten percent of course.
Seventh, the higher courts can assist the public interest by rendering decisions that encourage the trial courts to be attentive to lender fraud, and the validity of instruments used to transfer or foreclose upon mortgages. It is vital to the future of the California economy that citizens be allowed to make affordable payments and retain homeownership. In the absence of the monopoly banks modifying their ill gotten Payment Shock loans, or curtailing their criminally influenced foreclosure and collection mills, and the legislature’s apparent lack of confidence in their ability to compel them do so, it is up to the individual local courts, the trial courts, the courts of the people, to put a stop to the economic drain, and the destruction of families, on a case by case basis.
And what are the alternatives to these above mentioned measures? Well, pretty much what the private money masters are always asking for after they run everything into the ground, and that is World War III, whether formally declared, or just concealed and escalated from the present global conflict.
THE DENATIONALIZATION OF BANKS
February 22, 2011
When we, through our own elected officials, allow corporations to grow into monopolies so big, that they control our government, then we, the people, have effectively nationalized our corporations. It is no longer real capitalism at work. It is the dog-eat-dog unethical kind of capitalism. For when corporations become too big to fail, lest they bring down the government, then government's only option is to nationalize them with taxpayer money, and that is one of the most undesirable aspects of fascism --- and facists are always ruled by higher powers, like international industrialists and the controllers of central banks. There are other ways for central banks and international corporations to thrive, than exploit and destroy the citizenry, and thus eventually themselves.
THE RECAPTURE OF TRILLIONS
April 12, 2010
Yep, like millions of people around the world, Vince opposed the squandering of trillions to keep favored central banks afloat. But he wasn't against it necessarily because he thought that large international banks should be allowed to simply fail. The so-called Great Depression proved that emergency capital injections can become necessary to support the financial system. He was instead against the way the alliance between banking and government chose to do it, because for one brief moment, the highest people in our government (assuming those highest people in our government have any control over the New England families behind the Federal Reserve) had the leverage to require the central banks to become accountable, and restore trust in the main engine of the American economy, the Secondary Market, by standing behind the bogus mortgage backed securities the American central banks fraudulently pre-sold into that market and to the investment funds, pension funds, and nations around the world. But instead, based upon decisions influenced by panic, poor information, greed and sheer political corruption, the bank controlled politicians blew it, propping up favored institutions based upon perverse motives, and allowing insiders to position themselves to trade upon that information.
We need to cull out the relatively small numbers of people in power who became richer by defrauding the people of America, and the world. But meanwhile, Wall Street is doing business as usual, temporarily making record profits once again, and of course giving record bonuses, while millions of American families are worried about having a roof over their heads, or shoes to put on the feet of their children.
Most of the legislators in the United States Government and their masters controlling the banks are unconsciously or consciously covering up how they caused the economic collapse, because they are scared to death of a complete collapse. Legislators moreover are perpetually frightened of losing their main sources of campaign contributions. They feel virtually powerless when confronted by the powers inherent in the central banks by virture of their ability to withold, generate, and move money around. They are afraid because big banks own 40% of the media, and even have their own counter-measures people, and worse. Our elected legislators are also afraid that if they try to change and in doing so reveal the truth, that many of the banks will be shown to be insolvent. Also, they are relying on the time honored adage that "there is a sucker born every minute" and that the old suckers have short memories. So, they are following the tradition of failing to learn from their mistakes of the past, which will condemn them to repeat the very practices exacerbating the destruction of the world economy.
This is not just a financial crisis either; it is a full fledged moral crisis, with far reaching consequences for many who will be convinced to emulate such behavior. It is a crisis bound to result in unprecedented ideological and political blowback. It is a crisis that has tainted the image of America. It is an international crisis, being used to enslave countries around the world, that is similar in characteristics and greater in scope than the era of banking and industrial profiteering during the depression years that culminated in World War II.
Vince believes that once in office he will be able to persuade some of our legislators to do the right thing, whether he calls them on the phone, or can get them alone, face to face. He sees many of them have been brainwashed by their elite peers, and are failing to see what it is really going to take to get hardworking Americans and American businesses back on their feet. He believes that our politicians are acting as though they have the wool pulled over their eyes. Some don't seem to see that squandering trillions of dollars into institutions and government bureaucracies, propping up bankster regimes as if they were third world dictatorships, and inacting legislation to preserve insurance corporation profits at the expense of citizens, without any conditions, or assurances of actually bringing economic relief to the American people and their neighbors, is absolutely unconscionable.
On the other hand, Vince sees that there appear to be many other legislators, who actually do see the folly in preserving the corrupt status quo. But those legislators are content to go along with the evil in order to receive campaign funding. What is more disturbing, is that they appear to be so sure of themselves that they are willing to let us see that their hearings are a charade. They are so little concerned by public opinion and outrage that they no longer even try conceal their arrogance, and their corruption, other than to paper over it, and create unconstitutional laws.
Even if the bait and switch Tarp, and nearly 4 trillion power grab Stimulus Package, was not an unethical government Ponzi scheme, which it was, the bailed out banksters such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, should have, been required to make a commitment that none of the bailout funds could be used for lobbying, controlling the market by buying their own stock, playing favored nations, or acquiring properly run smaller banks. Now, our government and their bankster masters have essentially turned the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve into a complicated holding company, fueled by state subsidized hedge fund profiteering, at the expense of future generations of unwitting American taxpayers.
America and the American people don't have to admit fault in order to make restitution to the damaged investors around the world, because it is not our nation that is at fault. It is banking corporations that bullied our legislators into defrauding the worldwide secondary market. America simply needs to show our economic partners that we have the character to stand behind the things we export.
Even bad loans.
ON PASSAGE OF THE TARP AND STIMULUS BILLS
April 27, 2009
Why in the world did Congress pass the Tarp and Stimulus, against the wishes of millions of their constituents?
What were they afraid of?
A couple of things. Treasury Secretary Paulson went to Congress and scared the hell out of them by saying that if they did not act immediately to approve the first 700 billion bailout, it was going to be the end of America as we know it. He said if Congress did not act really fast there would be a domino effect shutting down Wall Street and hence the world's multinational corporations. There would be no bank lending at all, the economy would totally shut down, followed by civil unrest and martial law.
Congress was further compelled to act because it was implied that if they did not give Paulson and Bernanke what they demanded, a great many of them or their families were going to lose the backing and the favor of the financial services industry that put them in office in the first place. Their careers were threatened, not only by the loss of campaign funds, but by the thought of being blackballed, blackmailed or worse. What Secretary Paulsen should have said was that if Congress failed to act his own business connections would be shut down. He appears to have been protecting the lifestyles of the Wall Street folks he worked for, and whom he was planning to work for when he left office.
Who knows? if Congress had not approved the first bailout, maybe the tide would have pulled out further and a lot of those "associates" would have been shown to be presiding over institutions bolstered up and leveraged on mumbo jumbo, cooked books and undecipherable derivatives. God knows what the double books look like at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or what is kept secret at AIG, or the Federal Reserve. But the American people probably never will.
Were they afraid of the force that horrified and intimidated Woodrow Wilson?
"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
Woodrow Wilson
During 2005 and 2006 Goldman Sachs purchased over 20 billion dollars of insurance from AIG to hedge against the bogus triple A rated mortgage securities they held, in many cases insuring the defective mortgage backed securities for many times, sometimes even one hundred times, the face value of the underlying notes. They also began dumping mortgage backed securities to institutional investors, while at the same time betting that the mortgage market would crash.
VINCE'S ESSAY FROM RUTLEDGE CAPITAL REGARDING THE PENDING ECONOMIC CRISIS
October 26, 2007
People have become so hung up pointing the finger at each other, the political parties, the speculators, the people who got liars loans and the predatory lenders, that they have got many of us thinking that the world's financial problems were started by contagion from the "sub-prime crisis". But no one is taking responsibility. We've lost sight of what we knew in our hearts, that the misnomered sub-prime crisis scenario doesn't adequately explain away what's going on.
There's more blame to put on Democratic legislators, it appears, for blocking regulation of the GSE's and having exacerbated the mess, but that is because Democrats have the majority of legislators in the Senate and the House. These days, if a majority party doesn't materialize to enact legislation in favor of the banks, pharmaceutical or insurance companies and the other heavily lobbied interests, then you can bet that politicians from the other party will be changing their votes to make it happen.
In my view, partisan finger pointing about who did or didn't vote for what, even if it's correct, looks like passing the buck, even though it may not be meant to be, and it distracts everyone from the roots of the problem we must confront. Bills have so much pork in them that off times legislators can't vote yes on a bill they want, because at the same time they would approve something they're against.
It's not the Democrats or the Republicans. It's corporations, and the mortgage perks and campaign contributions that controlled Congress when our legislators could have averted this mess. That, and the fact that when legislators retire from office they are taken care of by those same corporations. And we can follow the money trail at: opensecrets.org
Look at the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who as you probably know is is always picked by the president from a list of three supplied by the banks. He gets away, under the flag of fighting inflation, with raising interest rates 11 times this year... Eleven times, even as the secondary market is choking to death on the "Triple A" rated paper that is being regurgitated back upon its originators because it really wasn't "Triple A" and had 15 and 20% delinquency rates from the moment investors around the world purchased it from American brokerages. And instead of correcting the problems, the investment managers, who amounted to little more than glorified salesmen, played down the damage being done to their international clients. Meanwhile, all the Federal Reserve and the banks that control it had to do, in order to preserve the medium and lower taxpayer's ability to make their mortgage payments, avoid massive defaults and thereby avert this crisis, was to lower interest rates. And that would not have cost the our government or the taxpayer anything.
If I were elected to Congress, and had the opportunity to influence my colleagues on Capitol Hill, here's what I'd do:
1) I'd lie and vote on things that I don't like, just like all the rest of them.
2) Well, maybe not number 1, but I WOULD do everything else I have in my power to do, to stay in office, just so I can hang in there long enough to get the few things done that I promise you I shall follow through with.
3) I will find alternative arrangements to confront and diffuse the incredible conflicts of interest under which our system at every level has enslaved all of us.
4) I promise to do everything I can to provide a more level playing field, between corporations and small business, and protect the legislative and judicial systems from monetary influence upon elections, and other more insidious forms of undue influence.
5) I would encourage the Central Banks to find ways to insure interbank lending, and not with derivatives, but with real dollars, in order to restore sorely needed interbank confidence and reign in the runaway Libor to which most adjustable mortgage instruments are tied (Since I originally wrote this piece the Fed has started throwing dollars at big banks, but that isn't exactly the way I thought it should work). The main reason why the lenders aren't lending isn't because they don't trust one another; it is because they are terrified about their own asset to liability ratio.
6) And now here cometh the fear mongering we have all grown to know and love: If these kinds of changes aren't made, we are headed into further disillusionment and crushing of the human spirit. People will think it's smart to become even less ethical in their dealings with others, and this current crisis will repeat itself. And when nations distrust one another and trade across borders becomes disrupted, then it will not be long before armies cross them.
Here's something else I thought of a year ago that I'd fight for:
Instead of rushing in to burn taxpayers in order to prop up the lifestyles of corporate folks, what we should do first, and I say first because I believe it would be a mistake to abandon Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, is to find a way to make whole the investors around the world that these banking corporations damaged with bogus securitizations of AAA mortgages in the first place. We don't have to admit fault, because it's not our nation that is at fault, it's corporations that bullied our government into it.
We simply need to show our economic partners that we have the character to stand behind the things we export. Even bad loans.
That in itself would do a lot more to revive the secondary market and get the world economic crisis under control than squandering our fiscal future to bail out those responsible for the crisis, thereby encouraging them to keep up to their old tricks.
Last year I registered to run for a Republican seat in the 31st District here in West Los Angeles. Not because I'm a Republican or a Democrat, but because that's where I felt I had the best shot. I paid the fee, but in December they told me somebody dropped the ball and it was too late to be on the ballot. Unbelievable isn't it.
If I'd had known how things were going to be right now, I would have made a bigger deal about it then. But I didn't think I had much chance, not being rich, and there are plenty of other guys out there who could do as good or better a job.
It just seems as though there aren't enough of them in Washington D.C.
Read what Rep. Charles A. Lindbergh had to say:
"To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do, will be to lower the (discount) rate, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when businessmen are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest.
It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.
This is the strangest most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance."
"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy."
Abraham Lincoln
(Assassinated by John W. Booth, the leader of one of the teams of agents funded through Canada by international bankers opposed to President Lincoln's agenda, and his national greenback program to support the financial sovereignty of the government of the United States.)
"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. When you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
James Garfield
(About a week before he was assassinated.)
FEDERAL RESERVE RELATED
On June 4, 1963, about six months before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110. This gave the U.S. Treasury the power "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. This gave the U.S. government back its power to issue currency, while stripping the Federal Reserve's power to loan money to the government at interest. Executive Order No. 11110 is still valid, but not utilized.
(This is not meant to directly blame the assassinations of three American presidents on international bankers, as there were other related reasons. But evidence suggests that organizations and people who enabled the assassins, or covered up the facts, were connected or beholden to the international banking families, and the central banks.)
REGULARLY AUDIT THE FEDERAL RESERVE, AND RESTORE STATES RIGHTS TO DEFEND CONSUMERS FROM BANKS
July 26, 2009
Yes, it appears that Willie Aames may have been living beyond his means...
When the news came out that Willie was the most recent celebrity to lose his home, self glorified establishment news commentators were quick to make snide remarks and chalk him up as another fool who wasn't as prudent as they are. But what if he was living within his means and it was his creditors who pulled the rug out from under him? Or maybe Willie lost his money because he was cheated while investing in a marketplace where the SEC protects the banks far ahead of protecting citizens. Maybe instead of paying his mortgage he simply squandered his savings on booze and dope because he lives in a country that would rather pay to lock up drug addicts than rehabilitate them?
It is very popular today, to think that the foreclosure crisis is about people buying homes or taking loans they could not afford, but we ought to stick up for homeowners who got sucked into this government created financial institution whirlpool, and deplore they way all distressed homeowners have been condescendingly portrayed, by everyone from President Bush, to former Secretary of Treasury Paulson to Uncle Ben Bernanke as getting into millions of homes they could not afford.
Rick Santelli on MSNBC bought into that. He was quite vocal that PRUDENT American taxpayers should not have to pay for their neighbors home improvements that were purchased with an unaffordable equity line. This is a just large dose of Money Master Propaganda, and the boisterous Mr. Santelli of MSNBC simply knows on which side his bread is buttered. And he is probably a bit brainwashed too. We have all been brainwashed. Think about it. All the trillions of dollars in taxpayer money being squandered to prop up the government's favorite banks is going to maintain the lifestyles of the elite. Another portion of the money is being funneled into corrupt federal and local government bureaucracies in the hope that some of it will find its way into worthwhile programs like education, infrastructure or solar energy. But we will never see any of that money going to bail Rick Santelli's neighbor out of an unaffordable home improvement. To the contrary, Rick's philosophy is engineered to focus the blame of the collapse away from the banks and the politicians, and make us dismiss and forget about the millions of American families who continue to be gobbled up by the unabated foreclosure crisis.
Borrowers who were imprudent are not a large percetage of the millions of American familes being crushed. Forty five percent of the all bankruptcies in America are still caused by medical bills, and bogus Big Insurance, with its stranglehold on our legislators, and our laws that are supposed to govern insurance companies, but have been instead rewritten to allow insurance companies to charge exorbitant premiums, or to lawfully avoid paying the full amount of valid claims. Yes 45% of American bankruptcies are still caused by medical bills and not people living beyond their means!
Many other Americans being forced into foreclosure are veterans with families, often with a wife and husband both working 14 hour days to try and pay the interest on loans that were affordable, but were deliberately raised by the lender, to enslave borrowers in a 90% debt to income ratio. Many others have fallen prey to out of control credit card companies, and their unethical model of increasing interest rates at any excuse. So, maybe for all we know, Willie Ames lost his home for some other reason than living beyond his means. Maybe medical bills wiped out his savings reserve that had previously seen him from actor's paycheck to actor's paycheck. Or maybe he was swindled by someone like Bernie Madoff, when corruption at the top of the SEC put the interests of banks and helping them hide their frauds, ahead of protecting citizens.
And maybe Willie's problem started with the banks themselves. We all know that on the front end the banks pay incentives to their agents to guide people who qualify for good loans into predatory loans. And on the back end, the banks own the rating agencies that fraudulently rated those predatory loans as triple A in order to package them and sell them as pools of mortgage backed securities.
For the past years, multinational financial institutions contaminated Wall Street and its counterparties around the world, with those packages of bogus triple A rated pools of mortage securities, that they named Structured Investment Vehicles, until all the investment banks became so badly damaged that they lost all trust in one another, and refused to trade.
THAT IS HOW FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS JUST CAUSED THE GREATEST ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
And we only know about the set ups that were happening on the front and back ends! What predatory schemes and strategies were being hatched within the central banks innermost circles? We may never be able to know, because all that information is protected, once again, by the foxes that are guarding the sheep.
Let's say you are the Attorney General of Illinois and have discovered massive lender fraud in procedures devised to trick borrowers into taking loans that were designed to fail in the first place, and you, as Attorney General attempt to subpoena those bank records. You will fail, because the State authority has been preempted by the Federal and you have no jurisdiction. You, as Attorney General for the State cannot get to see those records, because four years ago the lender's lobbies at the highest level of our government, succeeded in changing the laws and the rules to shield federally insured banks from the eyes of state government! Now should not the State have first authority in matters relating to a fraud upon its citizens?
Of course there are people on both sides, borrowers and lenders, who cheated the financial system, or who were not prudent. But that still does not mean that good Americans, who did everything right, who saved up their money to buy into the American Dream, but were instead tricked into sub-prime, Alt A and Option Arm Loans, when they qualified for something better, and then cornered with eleven consecutive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, should be ignored and abandoned by the leaders of our government, and the American people themselves.
For all the trillions that are being literally squandered into the economic collapse, one would think that congress could afford to significantly reduce income taxes, audit the secretive Federal Reserve, and support an honest solution, a real program, where hardworking Americans, who were defrauded, can have their loans reviewed and rescinded or fixed. One would think so...
But not in a government controlled by banksters.
How private central banks behind the so-called Federal Reserve, through their controlling alliances within government, and their continued election of like-minded politicians and judges, have victimized millions of homeowners, confiscated the savings of the middle class, placed the burden of their crimes upon the backs of the people, and assassinated most every politician who has presented a threat to them.
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Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Federal Government Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers
By Eliot Spitzer Thursday, February 14, 2008
Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.
Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.
Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.
What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.
In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.
Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.
When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.
Written in the Washington Post, by the Governor of New York, three weeks before they took him down.
Congressional representative for the courageous people of Florida, Alan Grayson, stood up against the most insidious amalgamation of government condoned lender fraud in history, and guess what? Not re-elected.
July 16, 2009
In August, 2010 U.S. theater chains began showing the trailer of INSIDE JOB, a movie that exposed some of the government/bankster collusion that literally caused the world economic collapse. But then the film was withdrawn from distribution, appearing on only a limited number of independent screens.
AMERICA NEEDS LEGITIMATE HEALTHCARE REFORM
Medical bills are the number two cause of bankruptcy in America. Currently 46 million Americans do not have health care coverage. Millions more Americans are under-insured causing bankruptcy and tearing families apart when struck with a life threatening illness. The American people wouldn't even be having a healthcare debate right now if Big Insurance and the medical industry hadn't been allowed to pay record amounts of contributions to our legislators, in order to stack the deck in their favor. Just like the situation with the central bank controlled U.S. government, many of the laws on the books today have been actually written by attorneys retained by Big Insurance to protect them from the people, at the expense of the people.
As such, Big Insurance offers hardly any affordable options at all for middle class families unless they are working for government or large corporations that can foot the bill. And to allow middle class families to be gobbled up into bankruptcy because they cannot afford medical care is not only unethical, but it exacerbates a major financial drag on the United States economy. We need to envision the reality of a National Optional Healthcare Program, as a safety net for those Americans who work just as hard as the folks who are working for government or corporations. But one of the main arguments against it, comes from the heavy pushback of Big Insurance, and their ability to capture the minds of many people who are fortunate to be satisfied with their present insurance, sometimes because it is paid for by their corporate or government employers.
Those who dissent may rightly believe their existing corporate or government paid insurance programs are fine for them. They don't need or want any change, and so many can be persuaded to believe that their insurance would be threatened by an optional public funded insurance plan. But properly structured public funded insurance wouldn't force anyone to change carriers. If everyone had a first hand experience of seeing just how low down, dirty and rotten Big Insurance can be, often willing to stop at nothing in order to worm their way out of legitimate claims for life-threatening illnesses, then many people would change their minds about the need for Healthcare Reform.
President Obama appears to be attempting to take a step in the right direction to provide quality healthcare for all. The problem is that the administration is operating from a platform built upon a corrupted corporatocracy that can't help itself from increasing bureaucracy and deficit spending at an dangerously unsustainable rate. It appears that the only option other than a national insurance safety net, is for government to properly regulate Big Insurance. But given Big Insurance's formidable lobby, that has proved to be an insurmountable task for our current corporate funded legislators...
Still, we must pry Big Insurance from its corrupt mainstream stranglehold of our healthcare system. We need to institute an optional type of American Healthcare, that does not discourage first class treatment, or encourage welfarism such as the Socialist Marxist model in Britain. The last thing we need is the soft tyranny, authoritarianism and irrationality of more bureaucratic power. And again, we wouldn't even need healthcare reform right now, if it had been illegal for the Big Insurance and medical industry lobbies to pay record amounts of contributions to our legislators
The user did NOT remove this video. We are the user and we did not remove it.
IT IS NOT ONLY AIG THAT IS CONDUCTING ITSELF IN THE MANNER SHOWN ABOVE
It is also Allstate, Chubb, and all the other big insurance corporations.
It is frightening and sobering to think, that for a long time, until recently, there were laws on the books in California that protected the rights of citizens to seek justice against such fundamentally illegal abuses. Now, due to the power of the insurance lobby over our legislators, there are none.
"We just paid 3 billion for these TV stations. The news is what we say it is!"
The dark screen below, once a weapon of honest information on the cyber front, remains here as somewhat of a memorial to Truth, and a reminder of the foolish, misguided or mercenary tools who work for the corrupt powers in the interest of personal greed and national destabilization.
PREVIOUSLY UNAFFORDABLE STIMULUS IS NOW AVAILABLE
If you are one of those who does not feel helped by our government's economic STIMULUS, or are simply having difficulty believing that things are getting better, a NEW kind of STIMULUS, a federally approved (FDA) procedure, Deep Brain Stimulus, is now available across the country, and locally through the UCLA Department of Biobehavioral Sciences. Funding to treat patients federally approved for DBS is projected to be an ongoing cost to taxpayers over future generations, but is intended in the long run to stem increasing costs of counseling for the clinically depressed or paranoid.
Leave Vince a message at WWW.VOTE4VINCE.ORG if you believe you or your family members should be approved for this procedure.
Leave a message for Vince at WWW.VOTE4VINCE.ORG if you believe it is unconstitutional for our Federal Government to directly support such programs, with or without taxpayer money, and that government supported programs and services should be first and foremost regulated by local State Government, and the vote of the people.
Leave a message for Vince on our CONTACT US page if you are inclined to VOLUNTEER YOUR ASSISTANCE on any of the above mentioned issues, or do something about the fact that a majority of our elected officials violated the law and the Constitution, by creating out of thin air and passing trillions of dollars, through no cap bailout bills, to favored banks and multinational corporations, against the wishes, and without any vote from the taxpayers of our United States.
Globalized multinational corporations can be regulated at the state level to honor people above corporate profits.
EXPLOITATION OF COAL, OIL AND NUCLEAR ENERGY TO BE PHASED OUT
So no matter what the level of human responsibility for adverse climate change or deadly radiological sources, when compared to other factors such as natural under-sea volcanoes or naturally occuring radiation, it still remains, aside from overriding economic concerns to phase out dirty energy without penalizing the world wide economic network, that we need to act responsibly and aggressively to phase out man-made poisons in our environment, particularly the toxic by-products of coal, oil and nuclear fission, in conjunction with the implementation of clean energy alternatives.
The world's leading science journals report that atmospheric greenhouse gases have reached levels not seen for millions of years. Glaciers are melting ten times faster than previously thought, the Rio Grande no longer consistently makes it to the ocean, and species are vanishing as a result of climate change. In California, we are in the midst of a ten year drought that has become progressively worse in recent years. If this drought continues at its present pace for another ten years, Lake Mead will be dry, leaving 4,000,000 citizens of the greater San Diego megalopolis without water. Marine life is losing the struggle to survive as the oceans are awash with heavy metals like Mercury, and nuclear by-products such as Cesium and Strontium. It appears we are experiencing an ever increasing succession of extreme weather events, long-term droughts, and rising sea levels. Clearly, further catastrophic events and consequences will continue to occur if no action is taken.
Several CEOs of coal, oil and nuclear corporations maintian that they have changed their minds from a year or two ago. Many say they now believe that global warming or the stockpiling of radioactive waste may be a threat. They say they are phasing their corporations to become green, or more safe. But actions speak louder than advertisments. Those same corporations are agressively building new plants. They have additional plants on the drawing board, and very little green alternatives by comparison. Meanwhile, the oil, coal and nuclear lobbies are allowed to continue showering money and favor upon regulators, legislators, and the public media.
Further, several of the politicians and experts who raise doubts about adverse climate change, or promote the safety and benefits of nuclear power, are simply not doing so in good faith. Some of them are merely misinformed, but many of them are bought and paid for 100%, by the lumber companies who see nothing but profit when they look at our forests, or by the dirty energy companies who like to cut corners and don't want to change their ways. In fact, many of our loftiest politicians have repeatedly proven themselves to be bought and paid for, when you consider that the last administration in Washington D.C. installed representatives from the oil, lumber, pharmaceutical, nuclear and financial corporations in charge of the federal regulatory agencies that were designed to protect the people and the environment from the greed of those very corporations in the first place.
THE FILTHIEST, MOST POISONOUS, MOST EXPENSIVE FUELS ON THE PLANET
Sadly, disgracefully, for the sake of money, many of our politicians and bureaucrats, the elected officials we entrusted to protect the people, and the environment, have been conspiring with corporate lobbyists for many years to keep America burning the filthiest, most poisonous, most expensive fuels on the planet. For the sake of money, they are still conspiring to cut down our forests, pollute the water and the air, and cover up the polution and injuries caused, by the production of toxic chemicals like Thimerosal, or the radioactive by-products of nuclear fission. Even if the burning of fossil fuels and the production of radioactice waste had nothing to do with damaging the environment, which it does, the creation of phthalates and synthetic estrogenic chemicals from the production of the vast array of fossil fuel based plastics, and the heavy metals produced by nuclear technolgies has been scientifically proven to be causing serious problems in the human reproductive cycle.
These politicians, bureaucrats and hired gun scientists need to be saved from themselves. They are committed to a policy of preserving continuing but dwindling profits for certain multinational corporations that refuse to change, at the expense of the economy, and the health and well being of the people of America and the planet Earth.
ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE NEXT DIRTY ENERGY DISASTER
February 21, 2010
I do not have an opinion whether the concept of global warming as caused by humans is a hoax or not. I do not really care one way or the other if the production of nuclear energy is purportedy safe. All one has to do is look around at the deadly by-products of fossil fuels and nuclear fission, to comprehend that going along with the status quo is worse than staring into the barrel of a loaded shotgun.
For instance, I remember fishing for all kinds of marine life in the Chesapeake Bay when I was a child. The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in America, but sadly, fish can't survive there anymore. One would presume that by now the poisoning of our rivers and oceans, the environmental damages from underwater oil drilling, and the tragedy of Chernobyl in 1986 would have encouraged authorities to begin phasing out the filthy energy sources of illness and disease, in favor of the clean alternatives from the heavens. Instead, lobbyists and government bureaucrats have attempted to convince us that the damage created by using coal, oil and nuclear energy is not palpable, or that levels of polution and radiation are acceptable in this great wide world.
Apparently these idiots are either oblivious or don't want to admit that the Earth is actually a small connected place, that the spec of dust on your desk might actually have traveled on the wind from the Sahara desert, or that any level of radiation is always potentially harmful. Cancer from radiation, whether from contact with particulate radioactive matter or radioactive rays such as we undergo at hospitals or checkpoints, always begins with just one microscopic unit of radiation breaking the DNA chain, in one tiny cell, and thereby interfering with the ability of that cell to regulate itself.
And as far as the concept of "Global Warming" is concerned, all one has to do is study the planet Venus to realize that the increased production of greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) cannot be good. According to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of "Livestock and Climate Change", the environmental impact of the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Report, Livestock's Long Shadow, issued in 2006, estimated that 18 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. However, Goodland and Anhang assert that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions. Whichever account is correct, these kind of findings indicate that there has been an increased production of livestock and poultry to feed more humans on the planet, and that a good percentage of greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by vegetarian diets.
Notwithstanding questions as to whether the concept of global warming is a hoax or not, and whether increased greenhouse gasses present an immediate danger, which they do, or that nuclear energy is allegedly safe, which it is not, common sense still tells us that it would benefit the planet's atmosphere, its oceans, and its citizens greatly, if we can start to phase out the dirty, filthy fossil fuel and nuclear energy by-products from hell, and replace them with the clean energy sources from the heavens, like the wind, geothermal power, and the electrons that come down to us free, from the sun.
Construction has begun in Southern California on two solar thermal plants for Pacific Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison, that will be providing 2.3 gigawats of solar thermal power. By itself, the Southern California Edison deal is the world's largest solar energy deal. The plants being built are bigger, but will be more cost effective to build than most other new plants. These kind of solar thermal plants are cheaper to build than coal plants, cheaper than gas plants, and they are building them a lot faster.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental advocate for the past 25 years, has said, "Once the plants are up and running, the energy is free forever. We won't have to go to Saudi Arabia and drill holes in the ground, then pump the oil up, and then refine it, and then ship it across the Atlantic with a military escort, and get in periodic wars in Mesopotamia and other places, and then have to distribute the oil across the country." Nor will we have engage in the expensive folly of burying or otherwise attempting to sheild ourselves from the toxic by-products of nuclear electricity plants that produce the deadliest, most radioactive poisons ever known to man, or continually look for new places to store the radioactive waste while gambling that terrorists, earthquakes or other naural disasters will never cause them to leech or bleed into the environment.
We don't have to continue down that path. Electrons are hitting our country for free, every day. If we build plants to pick up the electrons, and the infrastructure to deliver them, we can put them into our power lines... And if we are to build this infrastructure across the country, we can eventually provide 100% of the energy needs in this country, in conjunction with other clean power sources, for about 750 billion dollars. And 750 billion is less than the amount we spend to purchase foreign oil each and every year.
What we need to make this work is a straightforward market place. We need an open marketplace that does what a market is supposed to do, which is to reward good behavior, which is efficiency, and punish bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste. That is what Americans demand.
Today we have a market that is rigged to favor the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most expensive fuels from hell. We need to design a marketplace that rewards the clean, cheap, fuels from heaven. And we can do this rather quickly. For instance, in 1979 America started a national grid, a national backbone for the internet. In 1980, there were fewer than 500 personal computers in this country and IBM was saying it was a dead end technology. But now, every American has a PC, because we had a marketplace. Look at the effect that has had on the cost of information. It has plummeted to almost nothing. That same thing will happen with the cost of electrons if we follow through and build a national grid for electricity in this country.
Here is another example, in 1996, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act which opened up the telecommunications grid and spawned a national, and worldwide telecommunications revolution. That is why we have an Ipod. Today there are companies that can provide unlimited long distance and local calling for $18 a year. That is what is going to happen to the cost of energy, if we build a national marketplace that operates in a straightforward manner.
We need to make sure that the market rules are aligned with our national interests, and with the global interest of saving our planet. We need to make sure that our utility companies can make money by getting their consumers to conserve energy, and that their profits are not dependent upon them selling as much energy as possible, and then we need to open up the grid so that everyone can get on it. If we follow through with these fundamentals of our clean energy plan, we will make every American into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant, and we can power this country from American initiative and entrepreneurship of energy, rather than radioactive plutonium and foreign oil.
TEA PARTY LEADERS LOOK AT BANK/GOVERNMENT COLLUSION
November 13, 2010
I shared a Facebook link yesterday, of November's Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi about how the courts are helping banks to railroad homeowners; and I got a hit from Lisa Miller.
Lisa Miller
Lisa: Matt Taibbi is a progressive; a kept man. He started off strong with the piece on bubbles and has been twisting it since.
Vince: Lol. I see a lot of lame stuff on the net about Taibbi, mostly from conservatives. Maybe he's a knothead. But I also noticed him making statements on TV that Tea Baggers were being misled. And I tend to agree with him, at least to the extent that I was asked to speak at one of the first Tea Party rallies in L.A. and was then told that "picking on the banks" was not going to be part of the agenda.
Nancy: Great article.
Vince: Neither Dems nor Repubs can politically afford to acknowledge what really happened to the global economy. Lisa, oh Lisa. You raise up your head, and you ask, "Is this where it is?" And somebody points to you and says "It's his" And you say, "What's mine?" And somebody else says, "Where what is?" And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do ya, Mr. Jones...
Lisa: Vince, its banks and government collusion. They've been living off bubbles and the American people for some time now. Notice the victimhood mentality of those who can not pay. Florida, Nevada, California, Illinois had the highest amount of fraud. Then there are those suffering job losses as Govt spending drives unemployment. None the less they signed a contract.
Vince: Well sure, they signed contracts. Many of those payment shock contracts were just like a contract to buy a car on time, a car that the manufacturer designed in advance to breakdown. Thereafter, the manufacturer got that contract and millions just like it stamped AAA, and while secretly betting big-time against those contracts in a shadowy secondary market casino, the manufacturer sold those same contracts (which were not really about cars, but people's homes) to unsuspecting pension funds and municipalities in the USA, and to banks in France, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Russia, China, and the Netherlands. And when all those international investors became badly burned, and lost trust in the people running the (Eisenhower created) Secondary Mortgage Market, the market chiefly responsible for the American boom years since 1955, it broke the back of that previously free and liquid marketplace. Thereafter, the US central banks had nowhere to offload their fraudulent junk, and their liquidity evaporated. Then, as secondary market investors around the world demanded their money back under repurchase clauses, the USA bank controlled government felt it had no alternative but to create TARP, so the American taxpayers could get the bankers off the hook.
Injecting capital into world banks was essentially the right thing to do. But instead of making sure the billions of taxpayer dollars went to reimburse the pension funds and banks around the world that our banksters defrauded, which would have preserved the ability of the secondary mortgage market to function, and would have re-established trust that the American government stands behind the things it exports, even if the exports happen to have been fraudulent mortgage backed securities, the bankster government just couldn't control themselves, and instead rewarded themselves again by playing favored nations with the secret cash injections and then trading on that information too. So, instead of reviving trust in the Secondary Market and thereby solving the global liquidity crisis, which they had the opportunity to do, these banksters, tantalized by the thought of making another huge score, killed the main engine of the American economy.
Naturally, the central banks, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and the most powerful Wall Street brokerage firm Goldman Sachs, made sure the TARP money first went to pay insurance giants like AIG where they had insured their bogus mortgage securities 30 times above face value. For instance, for each one of those mortgages that went or goes into default, which they were betting big-time would, America's largest central bank, Bank of America collects 30 times the face value of each such mortgage note, and then gets to take back that same mortgage again, and resell it at a steep discount to a distressed debt securitization whose only interest is foreclosure.
You betcha.
There were homeowners who signed contracts all right; impossible contracts; mortgage contracts with unsustainable terms created for the sole purpose of populating deceptively high yielding pools of securities that had already been sold to unwitting investors in the secondary mortgage market. Once the Promissory Notes securing those unsustainable terms were signed by homeowners steered into those terms, their loans were electronically transferred to the real lenders, the securitization pools, that had already signed Pooling and Servicing Agreements designating the pretender lender as the Servicer. Thereafter, the real party in interest funded the loan to the pretender lender, i.e. Bank of America or Countrywide, that was claiming to be originating the loans, and the pretender lender "originated" and funded the borrower's loan.
The majority of homeowners who signed mortgage contracts between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2007 were actually signing with an undisclosed beneficiary fronted by a pretender lender that had already transferred its interest in the loan before it was ever funded. But contracts predicated upon fraud are null and void. So with reference to your closing statement "None the less they signed a contract," I can't argue that most of "them" probably did sign. But who were "they"? The nameless, forgotten people you categorize were all kinds of different people, who for different reasons were able to be steered into different kinds of deliberately unsustainable contracts. Lumping them all together, probably as imprudent speculators or deadbeats, sounds very "bankish" Lisa, although I think some of your other conservative positions are pretty cool.
Lisa: Vincent, if they couldn't afford the house, then they should not have bought it. Irrespective of declining house values, if they could afford to pay it, they should pay. If not, there is bankruptcy court. Or in this case, foreclosure.
As illegal activity perpetrated by our government and their agents becomes "legalized theft" that needs to be dealt with by limiting government and voting out the criminals that made it happen.
Vince: Trouble is, that the "legalized theft" you speak of is allowed by both major political machines that live in fear of the central banks.
And while your logic is sound about people who bought things they couldn't afford, it is also a little myopic. Not every one of "them" overextended themselves to buy a car or add on an extra bathroom. In many cases, banks and servicers pushed people into default with false promises of modifying their loans, or told them they had to skip payments in order to qualify, but then foreclosed. Other cases involve contractors, builders, who were contractually obligated to retire construction loans and who really had no choice but to accept the payment shock loans into which they were steered. Still others were cajoled into accepting unsustainable terms by being told they would be refinanced out of them.
In my own experience, Bank of America representatives seeking to earn a higher commission, switched my loan documents and stuck me with a no documentation Subprime mortgage, even though I applied for a full doc loan, and had a credit score above 750. After hundreds of phone calls and letters I finally got a modification, but they reneged and sent the payments back. So, I was forced to file my lawsuit against them.
There are lots of people like that, people who were swindled by America's largest central banks; maybe even more of them than the loan officers who were contributorily negligent and/or fraudulently steered people into loans they couldn't afford, for the sole purpose of earning the highest commissions in return for the too-good-to-be-true terms they had already sold to suckers in the Secondary Market.
Do you really think it is likely that 35 percent of the homeowners in America just decided to live beyond their means, and took advantage of the largest central banks behind the Federal Reserve? Don't you think millions of people might have been deliberately steered into unsustainable payment shock terms within empty shell securitizations, that were sold to unwitting secondary market investors way before the money to fund those loans was ever aggregated and funded to the banks who originated them after the fact? Don't you know that the current wave of foreclosures will be replaced by another, and then another, as more of those kinds of loans reset over the next four years, and that the central banks will make this Depression last a decade if not restrained?
But then something else is happenin' here, and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
Lisa: It is your responsibility to read and understand what you sign unless you are mentally incompetent.
Lisa Miller
Vince: Yes, and it is government's responsibility, to make sure their masters at the banks don't provide incentives and cash rewards for their loan officers to steer citizens into contracts that are designed to fail.
Lisa: I think everyone is responsible, from the inattentive citizen to the consumer, investor, taxpayer and the poor, Virtually anyone who didn't stand up and say "Stop!" We need remedy.
The only way to salvage this injustice is to withdraw taxpayer money from the market and contract the base so the productive and prudent can reclaim their purchasing power. This will deprive the plunderers of their ill-gotten gains at which point we can privatize and reset our markets to real market demand.
We need to reach market equilibium to return to market demand velocity. Hence a drop in home values is a correction not deflation. We need to stop manipulating the market. We need to return to commerce, charity and the individual and their rights and responibilities and reset government as honest brokers in regulation, tax and oversight.
YOUR COMMITMENT TO DEMOCRACY
Thank you, if you have read this far, for your commitment to Democracy.
Click on the link below for some recommended reading about the historical significance of Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th Century French political scientist who explored the social consequenses of tyranny.
Tocqueville reminds us that when the central government asserts its authority over states and communities, a tyrannical shadow lurks just behind. So long as local governments are strong, he says, even tyrannical laws can be mitigated by moderate enforcement at the local level, but once the central government takes control of the entire structure... our liberties are at grave risk.
Here are a few other links to my articles over the past few years. I've known how to genuinely correct the economy for a long time, but I'm going to need your help between now and November 2012:
Lisa Miller
Lisa Miller
