Barack Obama, His Criminal Bankster Donors and the LOOTING of the AMERICAN DREAM

Janet Tavakoli

President, Tavakoli Structured Finance

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)

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.
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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).

WHO ARE OBAMA'S PAYMASTERS?

“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."

Wall Street, White House blame homeowners in foreclosure crisis

By Tom Eley
16 October 2010

Wall Street has raised its voice against any government moratorium on foreclosures, even as evidence mounts that banks systematically and illegally falsified documents in order to expedite hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of foreclosures.

Documented examples of abuse include banks hiring contractors and what one Goldman Sachs executive referred to as “Burger King kids” to process thousands of foreclosure documents per week, all the while declaring to courts they were familiar with the cases. Lenders also falsified signatures, notary stamps, and tossed legal documents into the garbage. Every major bank is implicated in the widening scandal.

Yet to the barons of Wall Street these examples of law breaking—what a number of state attorneys general have called a “fraud on the court”—are immaterial, and those who were evicted deserved their fate.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, whose bank is implicated in the scandal, said this week in a conference call that there have been no accidental evictions. “We’re not evicting people who deserve to stay in their house,” the multimillionaire banker declared.

“If you didn’t pay your mortgage, you shouldn’t be in your house. Period,” Walter Todd of the investment advisory firm Greenwood Capital Associates, told Reuters.

“Everyone’s responsible for following the law. If we all don’t have to pay our mortgage, should we just stop paying taxes, too?” said Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisers. Everyone has to follow the law except the banks, that is. Schutz added, “Your mortgage didn’t get to a robo-signer by accident, it’s because you’re not paying.”

As Paul Krugman of the New York Times notes, “In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.”

Krugman attempts to distinguish these claims by Wall Street with the position of the Obama administration, whose opposition to a moratorium on foreclosures the Times columnist suggests is a policy mistake. In fact, the White House is of one mind with the banks.

In spite of mounting popular anger toward Wall Street—and the upcoming off-year elections—the Obama administration this week categorically ruled out any national moratorium on foreclosures, instead encouraging banks to review their own practices and carry through with foreclosures “as quickly as possible,” according to the Washington Post.

According to Fox News reporter Charlie Gasparino, an administration official “bragged” to him that Obama “could have publicly supported the foreclosure moratorium, and unleashed Attorney General Eric Holder to join state attorney generals, investigating the alleged fraud in the foreclosure process—but Obama didn’t after hearing from banks that the vast majority of people being foreclosed upon aren’t the victims of fraud and have defaulted on their mortgages.”

The banks’ policy was also spelled out by Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs this week. “If there’s an empty house in the neighborhood that somebody has a contract on and their closing date is next week and there is a moratorium, that closing doesn’t happen, right?”, Gibbs asked. “That sale doesn’t happen. That recovery doesn’t take place.”

Meanwhile, it is now clear that the voluntary moratoriums on foreclosures put in place by Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Ally Financial apply only to sales and evictions, and not to other parts of the foreclosure process, which continue unabated. However, the three banks are reportedly continuing foreclosure sales at a number of locations, including Jacksonville, Florida.

“It’s a farce,” said April Charney, a Jacksonville-area legal aid attorney and an expert on the foreclosure crisis. “We’re all being played.”

The mortgage foreclosure scandal continues to deepen and spread, implicating the government as well as the banks.

Federal agencies tasked with monitoring the bank mortgage industry, including the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, did nothing to stop the abuses, even though these were clearly not isolated, but systemic problems.

“[T]here’s no sign these agencies did anything to stop any of these institutions from treating the country’s courts so contemptuously,” notes Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil. “Perhaps the regulators were clueless. Or maybe they knew there was a problem and decided to let the banks run wild in the interest of keeping their foreclosure mills humming.”

Weil notes that Indy Mac Bank was actually controlled by a federal agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), while it engaged in the illegal processing of foreclosure documents.

Courts are also implicated. Florida’s legislature last year allocated $9.6 million to create special foreclosure courts in which judges play the role of “robo-signer.” One of these judges is Victor Tobin of Broward County. The Washington Post this week found Tobin “signing off on uncontested foreclosure cases as fast as a clerk could keep them coming, only a few seconds per file. ‘Batter up,’ he said as he finished one stack and eyed the next.”

The rampant falsification of loan documents has now raised doubts over the solvency of the entire mortgage security industry. The “robo-signers” basic task was to supply affidavits to courts in lieu of the actual documents related to ownership. In many cases, this paperwork may not exist or may be lost.

During the housing bubble, when the finance industry relentlessly promoted home refinancing and teaser-rate mortgages, the resulting loans were packaged and sold in complex chains of transactions that spanned the globe, building up enormous personal fortunes in the process.

When this Ponzi scheme inevitably collapsed, the legal paperwork to lay claim to properties was not there. “Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist,” Krugman notes. “The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.”

According to analysts, it is likely that lenders will face a tidal wave of lawsuits, not only from defrauded homeowners, but also from powerful investors who purchased mortgage-backed securities from them.

On Thursday, the stocks of major US banks suffered sharp losses as result of renewed concerns over their solvency stemming from the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup finished the day down more than 4 percent. The fall continued on Friday, with BOA and JPMorgan Chase shares falling more than 3 percent.

Spreads on bank credit-default swaps also grew sharply, with BOA’s reaching levels not seen since July 2009. The cost of insuring bank debt increased by over 6 percent during the week.

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Wsws.org… get on their free no ads E-NEWS!

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“Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whine about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage.” --- Maureen Dowd, NYTimes

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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, November 12, 2007

Mortgage giants Wells Fargo and Bank of America are accused of slapping dubious fees on homeowners struggling to save their homes. With fewer new mortgages being written, these
companies appear to be leaning on these lucrative fees to stay profitable—with devastating consequences for homeowners. We’ll have that report.

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Bank exec checked only date on Washington homeowner's foreclosure docs

By ALAN ZIBEL

AP Real Estate Writer

A Wells Fargo executive has acknowledged that he verified only the dates on up to 150 foreclosure documents he signed daily.

The executive made his admission in a May deposition involving a Washington state homeowner. He said he relied on co-workers to ensure that other information in the documents was correct.

Three other lenders, Ally Financial Inc.'s GMAC Mortgage unit, Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have halted tens of thousands of foreclosures after similar practices became public.

Wells Fargo & Co. is confident that foreclosure documents involving the bank are accurate, and it has no plans to halt foreclosures, said Vickee Adams, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based bank. She noted that the Washington homeowner's case was dismissed.

The deposition of the Fort-Mill, S.C.-based Wells Fargo vice president, Herman John Kennerty, was reported over the weekend by AOL Daily Finance and obtained by The Associated Press. Efforts to reach Kennerty were unsuccessful.

The growing questions about foreclosure documents could cause thousands of homeowners to contest foreclosures that are in the works or completed. But analysts say most homeowners facing foreclosure are still likely to lose their homes.

State attorneys general, who enforce foreclosure laws, are stepping up pressure on the industry.

On Saturday, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said her office is investigating an "apparent failure of major creditors to follow state foreclosure law."

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In the wake of the housing-bubble debacle, a legal morass

By Paul Krugman

Syndicated columnist

American officials used to lecture other countries about their economic failings and tell them that they needed to emulate the U.S. model. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, in particular, led to a lot of self-satisfied moralizing. Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the U.S. Treasury secretary, declared that the keys to avoiding financial crisis were "well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective corporate governance and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of contract enforcement." By implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.

We didn't.

The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

The story so far: An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on mortgage payments. So servicers — the companies that collect payments on behalf of mortgage owners — have been foreclosing on many mortgages, seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes? Horror stories have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits asserting that the papers are in order. And these affidavits were often produced by "robo-signers," or low-level employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn't exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage "trusts," which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers' obligations. But it's now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very bad. For one thing, it's a near certainty that significant numbers of borrowers are being defrauded — charged fees they don't actually owe, declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they aren't.

Beyond that, if trusts can't produce proof that they actually own the mortgages against which they have been selling claims, the sponsors of these trusts will face lawsuits from investors who bought these claims — claims that are now, in many cases, worth only a small fraction of their face value.

And who are these sponsors? Major financial institutions — the same institutions supposedly rescued by government programs last year. So the mortgage mess threatens to produce another financial crisis. What can be done?

True to form, the Obama administration's response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. That's worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal's editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they're saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it's the government's job to create them.

That won't be easy, but there are good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has proposed giving mortgage counselors and other public entities the power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

One thing is for sure: What we're doing now isn't working. And pretending that things are OK won't convince anyone.

Paul Krugman is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

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2003 – AND THE WELLS FARGO RAPE & PILLAGE ONLY WENT ON AND ON!

DEPARTMENT OF CORPORATIONS

The San Diego Union

By Craig D. Rose May 3, 2003

Wells Fargo mortgage license is revoked

State takes action over interest dispute

Citing a pattern of overcharging borrowers, state regulators yesterday revoked the mortgage lending license of Wells Fargo, but the bank will continue to make and service loans under federal jurisdiction.

The California Department of Corporations said Wells Fargo, the state's largest mortgage lender, has been charging consumers interest for days disallowed by state regulation.

"Wells Fargo charged consumers interest on their mortgages more than one day before being recorded, an admitted violation of California law," said Demetrios Boutris, state commissioner of corporations. "If Wells Fargo is not going to abide by California's laws, it has no right to California's licenses."

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“Wells Fargo said last month that first-quarter profit jumped 53 percent from a year earlier as borrowers rushed to refinance mortgages amid record-low interest rates.”

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