Friday, February 18, 2011

American Banksters WAR ON AMERICA - The Obama Donor Banks

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com


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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.



THERE IS A DIRECT LINK BETWEEN THE BANKSTERS, LA RAZA INVASION, LOSS OF JOBS, AND FORECLOSURES! OBAMA IS OWNED BY THIS BANKSTERS, AND WORKS FOR LA RAZA!





OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS DOIN’ GOOD! PROFITS UP! FORECLOSURES UP! BANK NO REGULATION GUARANTEED! BAILOUTS FOR BUYOUTS…. And not a single bankster donor in prison!



BUSH WAR PROFITEER, AND BANKSTER SLUT, DIANNE FEINSTEIN HAS TAKEN HUGE BRIBES TO DO THE BANKSTERS’ BIDDING! RIGHT NEXT TO HER FAT ASS WAS BARBARA BOXER!

LA RAZA DONORS, WELLS FARGO, MADE MASSIVE PROFITS (WE’RE NOW DOUBLING SO THE BANKSTERS CAN BUY OTHER BANKSTERS) OFF CRAPO LOANS TO ILLEGALS. FEINSTEIN WORKS HARD FOR OPEN BORDERS, MORE ILLEGALS, NO E-VERIFY AND INSTANT NO AMNESTY, LIKE OBAMA.

IN PART TO KEEP THE SUPPLY OF BANKSTER VICTIMS COMING, BUT ALSO TO KEEP HER BIG AG BIZ DONOR HAPPY WHO DEPEND ON THE MISERABLE WAGES THEY PAY TO ILLEGAL FARM WORKERS, STATISTICALLY ONE-THIRD OF WHICH WILL END UP ON WELFARE.

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“Top subprime lenders included Wells Fargo; Countrywide, purchased by Bank of America; Washington Mutual, now part of JPMorgan Chase; CitiMortgage, part of Citigroup; First Franklin (now closed), purchased by Merrill Lynch, which was purchased by Bank of America; ChaseHome Finance, JPMorgan Chase; Ownit, partly owned by Merrill Lynch, which was later purchased by Bank of America; and EMC, part of Bear Stearns, which was purchased by JPMorgan Chase. Most of the rest depended on massive loans from Wall Street. Many of these lenders were sued by states for fraud and paid billions in settlements.”



WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

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“Obama's rhetoric covered the whole financial industry, but the key changes will affect only a few high-profile players, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., while sparing investment banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”

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Lou Dobbs Tonight

Thursday, July 9, 2009

And Harvard economics professor JEFFREY MIRON will weigh in on the state of the U.S. economy—and why the only plausible argument for bailing out banks crumbles on close examination.

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"There is a populist and conservative revolt against Wall Street and financial elites, Congress and government," Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg warned in an analysis this week. "Democrats and President Obama are seen as more interested in bailing out Wall Street than helping Main Street."



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August 21, 2010

Janet Tavakoli.President, Tavakoli Structured Finance

August 15, 2010



How to Thwart the Assassins of the American Dream

Arianna Huffington's new book, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, paints a grim picture of the State of the Union:

"Every day, Americans, faced with layoffs and tough economic times, are forced to use their credit cards to pay for essentials such as food, housing, and medical care -- the costs of which continue to escalate. But, as their debt rises, they find it harder to keep up with their payments. When they don't, banks, trying to offset losses in other areas, turn around, hike interest rates, and impose all manner of fees and penalties..."

Third World America, (P. 77)



Our mediocre grammar school and high school educational system continues its downward slide. The Great Recession is squeezing school budgets. We are failing our children, our most important resource of all.



In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's infrastructure a near failing D rating:





"Flip on a light switch, and you are tapping into a seriously overtaxed electrical grid. Go to the sink, and your tap water may be coming to you through pipes built during the Civil War. Take a drive, and pass over pothole-filled roads and cross-if-you-dare bridges. The evidence of decay is all around us." (P. 95)



The over-hyped American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 earmarked only $72 billion of the $787 billion appropriation of taxpayer dollars to projects to improve the country's infrastructure.



Meanwhile, multi-national corporations avoid taxes, sheltering $700 billion in foreign earnings to end up with a measly $16 billion (2.3%) tax bill. GM is among those companies, yet it took almost a half billion dollars in bailout loans. Boeing and KBR Halliburton are among the defense contractors that avoid taxes, while enjoying government contracts worth tens of billions.



Banks (not Fannie and Freddie) Crippled the Housing Market



Fannie and Freddie do not make loans. They purchase mortgage loans and earn fees for guaranteeing payments on the loans. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, in 2006, Fannie and Freddie accounted for 33% of total mortgage backed securities issuance. In the first half of 2010, they accounted for around 64% of new issuance. They were forced to pick up the slack and buy more when Wall Street's private label securitization Ponzi scheme blew up.



Fannie and Freddie are Wall Street's dumping ground. They would have had problems on their own, but their problems would not have been close to their current scale, and they did not create the housing bubble.



Congress twisted arms to make Fannie and Freddie buy more than $300 billion of phony "AAA" rated mortgage-backed securities from banks, not counting loans that didn't meet their stated requirements. Today Fannie and Freddie want banks to repurchase tens of billions of these loans, since they fail to meet representations and warranties, and the banks are fighting this obligation.



Top subprime lenders included Wells Fargo; Countrywide, purchased by Bank of America; Washington Mutual, now part of JPMorgan Chase; CitiMortgage, part of Citigroup; First Franklin (now closed), purchased by Merrill Lynch, which was purchased by Bank of America; ChaseHome Finance, JPMorgan Chase; Ownit, partly owned by Merrill Lynch, which was later purchased by Bank of America; and EMC, part of Bear Stearns, which was purchased by JPMorgan Chase. Most of the rest depended on massive loans from Wall Street. Many of these lenders were sued by states for fraud and paid billions in settlements.



According to Inside Mortgage Finance, the top mortgage backed securities underwriters during 2005-2006, only two of the subprime abuse years, included now defunct Lehman Brothers ($106 billion); RBS Greenwich Capital ($99 billion); Countrywide Securities, which is now part of Bank of America ($74 billion); Morgan Stanley ($74 billion);Credit Suisse First Boston ($73 billion); Merrill Lynch ($67 billion); Bear Stearns, which is now part of JPMorgan Chase ($61 billion); and Goldman Sachs ($53 billion).



The above doesn't even include the credit derivatives, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and structured investment vehicles (SIVs) that amplified losses. Yet, Arianna notes how America imploded while bankers soared:



"Someone like [Robert] Rubin is able to wreak destruction, collect an ungodly profit, then go along his merry way, pontificating about how 'markets have an inherent and inevitable tendency -- probably rooted in human nature -- to go to excess, both on the upside and the downside.' This from the man who, as Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary, was vociferous in opposing the regulation of derivatives -- a key factor in the current economic crisis -- and who lobbied the Treasury during the Bush years to prevent the downgrading of the credit rating of Enron -- a debtor of Citigroup." (P. 150)



Robert Rubin operated an economic wrecking-ball from prestigious positions of influence including former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, director of the National Economic Council, former Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, board member and senior "risk wizard" counselor at Citigroup, member of the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations, member of the SEC's Oversight and Financial Services Advisory Committee, unofficial econmic adviser to President Obama, and co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.



Rubin is just one example of the many bankers, who helped destroy the economy while creating a connected financial oligarchy.



Hide Billions of Losses, Take Bailouts, Collect Billions, Skip Jail



Instead of apologizing for screwing up, the banks demanded the Great Bailout. At the start of the meltdown, the IMF and the U.S. administration estimated losses of $2 to $2.5 trillion. Unemployment and the losses are now shockingly worse. What was merely a recession escalated into the Great Recession.



How big are the actual losses? No one knows.



After destroying the value of major banks, culprits used their enormous political influence -- funded with taxpayer dollars -- to get Congress to force the accounting board to change accounting rules (as of April 2009) so banks don't have to recognize losses until they sell the assets.



According to William K. Black, after the much tinier S&L crisis, there were over 1,000 successful felony prosecutions, several thousand successful enforcement actions, and roughly 1,000 successful civil actions.



This time Congress gave us the Great Cover-up. Bank officers dodged jail time and collected billions in bonuses. As one of my South American friends observes, he's witnessed this third-world corruption before, and this time it's in English.



Banks Stall the Recovery and Prolong the Great Recession



Unemployment marched upward, delinquencies soared, and banks stalled foreclosures. The longer banks delay foreclosures and sales, the longer they can avoid acknowledging losses. Phony accounting and zero cost funding from taxpayers created an illusion of recovery.



Stalling helps banks while they pressure Congress to bail out failed mortgages with taxpayer dollars. Instead of working out mortgages with homeowners, they can wait for a government program to buyout or subsidize their failing loans. The markets aren't recovering, because banks own colossal chunks of mystery-meat assets.



It's a black hole of debt. If banks were forced to price these assets at market values and sell them, the market would clear, and the market would make a faster recovery. When Japan did this, it stalled its economy for twenty years, and it still hasn't recovered.

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US banks fake documents to rush foreclosures

By Tom Eley

7 October 2010

Major US banks systematically faked documents in order to speed up foreclosures for hundreds of thousands of homeowners, a mounting body of evidence shows. It appears likely that federal and state laws were broken in the process.

The scandal speaks both to the dimensions of the social crisis and the criminality of the big banks. The immediate cause of the mortgage lenders’ rampant cheating on foreclosure paperwork is the tidal wave of families ruined by the economic crisis—a crisis itself set into motion by the banks’ predatory lending practices. The goal was to get people out of their homes as efficiently and ruthlessly as possible, skating over legal requirements relating to documentation.

Politicians have responded with calls for investigations and temporary suspensions of foreclosures. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and 30 other California representatives this week demanded a federal investigation into the mortgage lending industry in a letter sent to the Justice Department. Democratic Senators Al Franken of Minnesota and Robert Menendez of New Jersey on Tuesday requested an investigation from the Government Accountability Office into the role of government regulatory agencies in allowing the abuses to take place. Attorneys general in a number of states have launched investigations, and foreclosures have been temporarily stopped in a few.

This pre-election concern for embattled homeowners is dishonest to the core. In fact, the entire process of dispossessing Americans from their homes has been facilitated by politicians of both parties, and in particular President Obama, whose bogus “housing rescue” of 2009 did nothing to address the root cause of the disaster: the fact that mortgages are vastly overvalued and not at all symmetrical to the incomes of US workers. This has left millions of homeowners “underwater”—owing more to banks on their homes than the market value.

At the same time, the Wall Street bailout and Obama’s repeated promises that he “would do whatever it takes” to cover the banks’ bad debts has ensured that lenders have no incentive to reduce drastically overvalued principal on bad loans. As a result, foreclosures have accelerated in 2009 and 2010.

The scandal emerged last month after evidence of fraud forced Ally Financial (formerly GMAC Mortgage), the fourth largest US mortgage lender, to stop foreclosures in the 23 states where a court order is needed to take over a property. This was followed last week by similar moves from financial giants JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Also implicated is Wells Fargo, and it is generally accepted that all the major banks were using similar methods to speed the dispossession of homeowners.

In the 27 states that do not require judicial review, lenders continue to prosecute foreclosures even though they employed the same dubious, and likely illegal, practices. Among states that do not require judicial review is California, the nation’s most populous state and leader in the total number of mortgage foreclosures.

Notarized documents are required to transfer a property from one institution to another. But typically banks do not produce paperwork proving they have “standing” or the legal right to foreclose. Instead they supply affidavits that have been signed by a legal services firm hired by the bank or loan servicer. These signatures are, in theory, to be administered by a neutral, third party notary public, who is legally required to read and review the documents.

What has emerged, however, is that the notarization system was pervasively abused by major financial institutions. Among other practices, it has been revealed that notarizations took place at an impossible rate of thousands per month per reviewer, that they occurred even before the attested documents were actually prepared, that signatures ostensibly representing the same individual bank employee were clearly produced by more than one person, and that notarizations took place in offices far away from where documents were signed.

Additionally, courts are finding it difficult to determine what banks actually own mortgages. This uncertainty is owed to the securitization of mortgage debt, which is routinely bundled, sold, divided, and then rebundled and resold again. The result is often that multiple banks make claims on the same properties.

As a result of the scandal, foreclosures have been temporarily halted in several states. Lawyers representing homeowners are now much more likely to pursue legal redress. And judges may well reopen cases of previously foreclosed homes.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said many of the documentation abuses could mean that “foreclosure sale[s] would have been invalid.” Ohio and Iowa could levy fines of $25,000 and $40,000, respectively, for “every instance of an affidavit that was filed improperly or every time facts were attested to that weren’t true,” as Ohio’s attorney general put it. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called the mortgage documents “a possible fraud on the court.”

A class action lawsuit is already under way on behalf of Kentucky homeowners against abusive mortgage practices, and many more are likely to follow. Home title insurers, responsible for any unclear ownership situations, will also likely launch lawsuits against the banks to recoup losses.

The net effect of these actions will likely be to delay the hundreds of thousands of foreclosures expected to make their way to the market, steering buyers away from foreclosed homes already on the market and thus further driving down home values. It can be safely predicted that the Obama administration and both major parties will take as their primary duty the protection of the banks, as has been their overriding concern since the eruption of the financial crisis two years ago.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis continues to deepen. In August, lenders set a record by repossessing over 95,000 US homes, and issued foreclosure paperwork to 338,836 households, according to RealtyTrac.

According to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, the percentage of loans delinquent by at least 90 days rose to 9.5 percent of all US households in the first quarter of 2010, up from 4 percent a year earlier. Over 5 million homes are now in the process of foreclosure.



Voters Must Demand the Solution



Voters must demand that Congress uncovers and publicizes facts and prosecutes the financial system's massive multi-year frauds. This will mean thousands of felony prosecutions, enforcement actions, and civil actions.



Congress completely failed in genuine regulation and enforcement. It must start over on financial reform, regulate derivatives, commodities trading, update Glass-Steagall, and more. It will have to break-up the Too Big to Fail financial institutions.



CEOs of our Systemically Dangerous Institutions (SDI's) fail to manage them, because no one is capable of doing it. Like a morbidly obese junk food addict, banks won't even get on a scale. Our banks refuse to properly measure (account for) the problem.



Third World America elegantly summarizes the way forward. Arianna Huffington names the culprits and gives a roadmap for solutions. The rest is up to us. We deserve better than a third world economy divided by ultra-rich on one side and debt-ridden middle class and dirt poor citizens on the other. Citizens must demand a clean-up of corruption and a foundation for healthy growth.

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