Thursday, March 15, 2012

GOLDMAN SACHS - Of Muppets and Manhattan by Nicole Gelinas - City Journal

Of Muppets and Manhattan by Nicole Gelinas - City Journal

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ALSO http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/03/banks-obama-his-criminal-bankster.html

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ALSO: http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/03/obama-and-goldman-sachs-partners-in.html

TO WORK IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, ONE MUST COME FROM SOME CRIMINAL WALL ST BANKSTER, OR BE A MEMBER OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA!

DO A SEARCH ON THE BLOG FOR OBAMA’S SEC. of LABOR HILDA SOLIS, CECELIA MUNOZ AND HIS “WISE LATINA” LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER SONIA SOTOMAYER!

GOLDMAN SACHS IS A MAJOR OBAMA DONOR!
“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).”

“It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.”

An insider’s view of Wall Street criminality

15 March 2012

Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation Wednesday in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, denouncing the bank's“toxic” culture of avarice and fraud.
Smith headed the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In his column, entitled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” he describes a corporate environment that encourages and rewards big short-term returns gained through the bilking of clients and the general public. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” he writes.

Speaking of one’s clients as “muppets” and describing deal-making as “ripping eyeballs out” are commonplace at Goldman, according to Smith. The way to advance at the Wall Street giant, he writes, is to persuade your clients “to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of,” get your clients“to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman,” and trade “any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”

The column describes an operation in which laws and regulations requiring financial institutions to deal honestly with their clients and protect their interests are routinely violated. The insider’s indictment of Goldman Sachs highlights a broader process—the criminalization of American capitalism as a whole.

It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.

Education, health care, pensions are being gutted, wages are being slashed and more austerity is on the agenda because there is supposedly “no money.” Corporate profits and CEO pay, meanwhile, are setting new records.

This is an indictment not simply of Goldman Sachs, or even Wall Street alone, but rather the entire economic and political system. Every official institution—the White House, Congress, the courts, the media, the Democratic and Republican parties—is complicit.

Smith’s column was widely reported in the media. NBC Nightly News led its report Wednesday night with the story, interviewing a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who was brought on to deplore the type of practices described by the former Goldman executive. The ruling class is well aware that popular anger against Wall Street is rising and capitalism itself is becoming increasingly discredited in the eyes of millions of Americans—a process that found an initial expression in the Occupy Wall Street protests. It is concerned that Smith’s piece will further fuel this sentiment.

The practices to which Smith points—and worse—are well known to the Obama administration and the financial regulatory agencies. In April of last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a 640-page report outlining in detail the fraudulent and illegal practices of major banks that contributed to the September 2008 crash. Fully 260 pages of that report were devoted to Goldman Sachs. They explained chapter and verse, giving dates and naming names, how the bank defrauded its clients by selling them mortgage securities while betting against the same investments, without telling them it was doing so.

The committee also documented the complicity of the credit rating firms and federal regulators in the colossal mortgage Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2007-2008, setting off a new world depression. It cited securities laws that had been violated by Goldman and two other banks it examined, Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, and referred this information to the Obama administration’s Justice Department.

The response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.

One Wall Street firm after another—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial—has been allowed to settle charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission out of court, paying token fines while admitting no wrongdoing. That this continues is seen in the filing Monday in federal court of the sweetheart settlement between five major banks and the state and federal governments of charges arising from the banks’ illegal processing of foreclosures. The banks have merely to pay a combined fine of $5 billion for illegally throwing thousands of families out of their homes, with no admission of wrongdoing. In return, they get the quashing of state investigations that threatened to result in tens of billions in damages and fines.
Not only does the Obama administration protect the Wall Street criminals, it includes their representatives among its top personnel. To cite some examples:

* Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

* Dianna Farrell, former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, is deputy director of the National Economic Council.

* Jacob Lew, Obama’s chief of staff, was a top executive at Citigroup. He follows two other bankers chosen by Obama to head his White House operations—former JPMorgan executive William Daley and former Chicago investment banker Rahm Emanuel.

The criminalization of the American corporate-financial elite cannot be separated from the capitalist system itself. It is the product of a decades-long process of crisis and decay, in which the ruling elite has increasingly separated its wealth-making from the production of real value.

Manufacturing and the productive infrastructure have been decimated, while financial manipulation and speculation have come to dominate economic life. The working class has suffered a catastrophic decline in its social position at the same time that a parasitic financial aristocracy has come to exercise a de facto dictatorship over the political system.

Like all aristocracies, the American financial elite will not accept any infringement of its wealth and power. The working class must break its grip by mobilizing its strength in opposition to both parties of Wall Street and fighting for the establishment of a workers’ government and socialist policies, beginning with the nationalization of the banks and corporations and their transformation into public enterprises under the democratic control of the working people.

Andre Damon and Barry Grey
The author also recommends:

The foreclosure fraud settlement: An amnesty for Wall Street criminals[13 February 2012]

Senate report on Wall Street crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class[18 April 2011]

CALIFORNIA IN MELTDOWN! THE RISE OF LA RAZA "THE RACE" SUPREMACY & THE MEX WELFARE and PRISON STATE

CA PUTS OUT $20 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS!!!

CA HAS THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON SYSTEM IN THE NATION. HALF THE INMATES ARE ONE OF MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST EXPORT; THE COMMON CRIMINAL!

ACCORDING TO CA ATTORNEY GEN. KAMALA HARRIS, HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE BY MEX GANGS!!!

THERE ARE ONLY EIGHT STATES WITH A POPULATION GREATER THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY WHERE HALF THE JOBS ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. THIS SAME COUNTY PAYS OUT $600 MILLION IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS, PRIMARILY TO MEXICO’S THIRD LARGEST EXPORT; PREGNANT WOMEN!!!

THE LA RAZA INFESTED STATE LEGISLATURE HAS JUST PASSED THE ULTIMATE MEXICAN DREAM ACT – THEY HAVE MADE IT ILLEGAL FOR EMPLOYERS TO USE E-VERIFY! VIVA LA RAZA???


OH, AND MEXICO’S LARGEST EXPORT ABOVE POVERTY, LOOTERS, CRIMINALS AND ANCHOR BABY BIRTHERS IS DRUGS!!! MEXICO HAULS BACK $20 - $60 BILLION PER YEAR IN DRUGS!!!

YOU REALLY WANT OBAMA’S AMNESTY, OR CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT???

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latimes.com

Opinion

California must stem the flow of illegal immigrants

The state should go after employers who hire them, curb taxpayer-funded benefits, deploy the National Guard to help the feds at the border and penalize 'sanctuary' cities.


Illegal immigration is another matter entirely. With the state budget in tatters, millions of residents out of work and a state prison system strained by massive overcrowding, California simply cannot continue to ignore the strain that illegal immigration puts on our budget and economy. Illegal aliens cost taxpayers in our state billions of dollars each year. As economist Philip J. Romero concluded in a 2007 study, "illegal immigrants impose a 'tax' on legal California residents in the tens of billions of dollars."

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The danger, as Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson argues, is that of “importing poverty” in the form of a new underclass—a permanent group of working poor.
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“But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation.”

 March 13, 2012 | Wall Street Journal



by Michael J. Boskin (Senior Fellow; member of the Task Force on Energy Policy; and member of the Working Group on Economic Policy) and John F. Cogan (Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow; member of the Working Group on Economic Policy; member of the Working Group on Health Care Policy ; and member of the Task Force on Energy Policy)

Long a harbinger of national trends and an incubator of innovation, cash-strapped California eagerly awaits a temporary revenue surge from Facebook IPO stock options and capital gains. Meanwhile, Stockton may soon become the state's largest city to go bust. Call it the agony and ecstasy of contemporary California.

California's rising standards of living and outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking. From the mid-1980s to 2005, California's population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California's economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12% of America's population, California has one third of the nation's welfare recipients.

Partly due to generous union wages and benefits, inflexible work rules and lobbying for more spending, many state programs and institutions spend too much and achieve too little. For example, annual spending on each California prison inmate is equal to an entire middle-income family's after-tax income. Many of California's K-12 public schools rank poorly on standardized tests. The unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities of workers in the state-run Calpers system, which includes teachers and university personnel, totals around $250 billion.

Meanwhile, the state lurches from fiscal tragedy to fiscal farce, running deficits in good times as well as bad. The general fund's spending exceeded its tax revenues in nine of the last 10 years (the only exceptions being 2005 at the height of the housing bubble), abetted by creative accounting and temporary IOUs.

Now, the bill is coming due. After running a $5 billion deficit last year and another likely deficit this year, Gov. Jerry Brown's budget increases spending next year by $7 billion and finances the higher spending with income and sales-tax hikes. Specifically, he's proposing a November ballot initiative raising the state's top income tax rate to 12.3%, making it the nation's highest, and raising the basic state sales tax rate, already the nation's highest, to 7.75% from 7.25%.

While Mr. Brown deserves credit for some earlier spending cuts to reduce a large inherited budget shortfall, the budget fails to address long-run structural problems, counting on a cyclical economic recovery and stock bubble for a bailout until the next self-inflicted crisis. Moreover, he's thus far failed to embrace a bold reform agenda to save money, improve services, and restore confidence among the state's beleaguered taxpayers and bond holders.

The ballot initiative's $31 billion, multiyear "temporary" tax increase is larger than the "temporary" hike it replaces and its income-tax hike is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2012. Worse, it doubles down on excessive reliance on high-income taxpayers, especially their stock options and capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income. During economic good times, it's not unusual for the state to collect one-half of all income-tax revenue from the top 1%. This extreme progressivity leads to boom-bust cycles of rapidly rising revenue followed by complete collapse. Not surprisingly, the revenue is all spent on the upswing, forcing disruptive "emergency" cutbacks on the way down.

The state's progressive tax-and-spend experiment is broken, threatening basic services, from courts and parks to education and health care for its most vulnerable citizens. Mr. Brown's tax initiative only exposes the state to an ever more dangerous roller-coaster ride.

No wonder many Silicon Valley CEOs say they won't expand in California because of high taxes and burdensome regulation. And no wonder net migration has recently reversed, with hundreds of thousands of workers and their families leaving the state in search of better opportunities.

PAYING FOR THE LA RAZA MEXICAN WELFARE STATE – HOW “CHEAP” IS THAT MEX LABOR AFTER ALL???

California still ranks first in technology, agriculture and entertainment among the 50 states. But it is near the bottom in business and tax climate and state bond ratings. It's a complex picture, but at its core is the high-tax welfare state run amok.

Many Americans fear the federal fiscal train wreck will turn us into Greece. But, barring major change, they need look no further than California to see what this future portends. Relying on ever-higher taxes to fund payments to an outsized population of benefit recipients is a recipe for exporting prosperity. That is one California trend that other states emulate at their peril.

No one should write off California. It still has great strengths. And it can turn some of its short-term challenges, such as the pressures from ethnic and linguistic diversity (the state is now 37% Hispanic and 13% Asian), into long-term strengths in the global economy. But the political class must face up to the reality that services will have to be far more carefully targeted; the tax system overhauled with lower rates on a broader base of economic activity and people (almost half of all Californians pay no state income tax); and inefficient state programs reformed to spend less and produce far better outcomes.

Mr. Brown is a man of ideas, having run for president in 1992 on a bold flat-tax agenda. Instead of still more antigrowth tax hikes, he should break the grip on the state legislature of his party's special interests—public employee unions, trial lawyers, teacher unions and extreme environmentalists.

A California renaissance—building on the best reforms in budgeting and taxes, education and welfare, crime prevention and pensions by such leaders as Rudy Giuliani, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo—is still possible. What it requires is a governor with the vision, determination and political will to see it through.

Messrs. Boskin and Cogan are, respectively, professors of economics and public policy at Stanford University, where they are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution.

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BOOK: MEXIFORNIA – THE SHATTERING OF THE AMERICAN DREAM WITH THE MEXICAN INVASION AND OCCUPATION

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"Victor Davis Hanson brings a lifetime of experience in California's Central Valley to this indictment of multiculturalism and mass immigration." -- Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies



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READER’S REVIEW (source: AMAZON)

If you don't understand something or disagree with a concept then the best way to conceal your ignorance or discredit the idea is to call it "racist". Dr. Hanson did not have to go very far out on a limb to make the point that non assimilation of Chicanos to American culture is divisive and destructive - and that it is the new immigrant that is failing to adapt. Great book, on point and very timely.



*Starred Review*

Classics professor Hanson is also, like generations of his family before him, a fruit farmer in California's central valley. He has employed immigrants, seen them flood his community during the last 30 years of mass flight from Mexico, and endured the crime associated with illegal immigrants. Hanson is immensely sympathetic to poor Mexicans, however, and the most powerful chapter here outlines the harried life of the illegal alien. But he hates to see the ordered culture in which he grew up drowned by an alien inundation whose undeserving beneficiaries are Mexico's kleptocratic rulers, for whom an open border is a safety valve expelling the potential for democratic change. The four solutions to the mess that Hanson enumerates include continuing de facto open borders but insisting on rapid acculturation; patrolling the border effectively and reducing legal immigration; imposing "sweeping restrictions on immigration" and ending Mexican chauvinism in the U.S.; and allowing present policies to make California increasingly mirror an unreformed Mexico. Hanson thinks that the U.S. "still need not do everything right" to prevent social collapse in the Southwest and that the totalitarian uniformity of valueless mass culture may soften that collapse. He also sees very clearly what has brought this crisis on: the American globalist ideology's lust for cheap labor and emphasis on "raw inclusiveness" instead of "standards and taste."

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Review

"Hanson's 'Mexifornia' is that rare book that combines scholarship with personal experience to provide genuine insight into a complex issue." -- Linda Chavez, author of An Unlikely Conservative

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"Victor Davis Hanson brings a lifetime of experience in California's Central Valley to this indictment of multiculturalism and mass immigration." -- Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies

·         Hardcover: 150 pages

·         Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (July 25, 2003)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1893554732

·         ISBN-13: 978-1893554733



ALL REVIEWS ARE FROM AMAZON.com



REVIEW 1

This review is from: Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (Hardcover)

This book shows how Mexico sends their poor to America to work, so they don't have to improve their own country, and how we use these people for cheap labor so that we can sell things for less. It's a deal made between the two countries. The trouble is, it's not what American citizens want. The "servants of the people", the representatives, are not listening to us, so it's always exciting to read something that really tells it like it is.

This book is written from the viewpoint of someone who actually lives with these Mexican immigrants. The rich people who want to use them in their businesses for cheap labor don't live with them; the liberal elites who push for them to get amnesty don't live with them. This guy lives among them, and knows the problems first hand, and as I suspected, there are many, and they're not pretty.

He writes very bluntly about the problems, but not without sympathy for the Mexican immigrants whose own country won't take care of them. With all the new books out and the discussions going on about legal and illegal immigration, and what the American people want, I'm hoping that these problems will be solved. This book is one of the best on the subject, because it is written from a viewpoint of personal experience.

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REVIEW 2

Victor Hanson combines scholarship (Professor at Cal State) with personal experience (life long resident and farmer in central CA. who has Mexican-American family and friends) to present a thoughtful look at the illegal Mexican immigration crisis. Hanson argues that the reason for this crisis is that both ends of the political spectrum have vested interests in continuing the unabated entry of illegal Mexicans. Republicans wish to placate business interests with cheap labor and Democrats hope for a future electoral base. Hanson further explains that this wave is not like the earlier waves of Polish, Jewish, or Italian immigration which was of a fixed duration and where the connection of the new immigrant to the Homeland was more thoroughly severed.
This book is well written and to the point (approx. 140 pages). I have also seen Victor Hanson on several political talk shows. He is well spoken and mild mannered which is a welcome relief from the cacophonous diatribe we too often get on cable news channels.

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REVIEW 3

As one who shares the author's ethnic,cultural and geographical heritage, I thought Hanson did a marvelous job of assessing California's major social issue, and one of America's primary problems. Like Hanson, I was born and reared in Fresno County, albeit some 25 miles from his native Selma. I can attest to the accuracy of his description of Selma and the Central Valley in the 1950's.

As a child, my associates included Hispanics; as a teenager working in the fig and peach orchards, my fellow workers were Hispanic. During my professional career, I have hired and promoted many Hispanics.

Hanson's Scandinavian ancestors (from Sweden) and mine (from Denmark) came to America legally and without speaking English, but they succeeded--without bilingual classes, welfare, government subsidies, or that phenomenon known as "affirmative action", which is being rapidly unmasked as nothing, more or less, than "reverse discrimination". Hanson deftly exposes the race industry as an amalgam of organizations and individuals who are quick to attack the Anglo for any slight, either real or imagined, but who, in the long run, seem not to do much for those whom they purport to serve.

As a criminologist, I am well aware of the violence committed by Hispanic Gangs, and the fact that those gangsters who do not wind up in the morgue soon become expensive inmates in our overcrowded prison system, costing taxpayers some $25k per year each. I am equally aware of the many outstanding Hispanic officers, prosecutors, and judges with whom I've worked.

Hanson has eloquently described the failure of our educational programs to work toward an assimilated America, as well as the failure of the "separatists" in the race industry.

The one failure which, to my surprise, he did not identify is that of our elected officials who establish public policy. When Hanson and I were youngsters/young men in the Central Valley, the politicians seemed to act in the best interests of their constituencies. Today,by and large, our politicians have little integrity, but rather pander incessantly to special interests which, in turn, provide them with campaign funds, endorsements,and precinct workers.It is common knowledge that, in Sacramento, legislative votes are "for sale" almost daily. Until we can restore some integrity among our public officials, we will not move toward a better California--better for Hispanics, Anglos, African Americans, Asians, and all others!

Except for his failure to discuss the lack of integrity among many of our elected officials, Hanson has done an admirable job. Mexifornia should be on the "must read" list of all who are concerned about the future of Californians, nothwithstanding the color of their skins!

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DICK LAMM, GOVERNOR OF COLORADO



REVIEW 4

We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his thoughts are particularly poignant. Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington, DC, filled to capacity by many of America's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, "Mexifornia," explaining how immigration - both legal and illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.

Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America. The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States. He said, "If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let's destroy! America. It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that 'An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.'"

"Here is how they do it," Lamm said: "First, to destroy America, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country." History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour Lipset, put it this way: "The histories of bilingual and bi-cultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and
tragedy." Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans."

Lamm went on: Second, to destroy America, "Invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal. That there are no cultural differences. I would make it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice and
discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds.

Third, "We could make the United States an 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: "The apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentricity and what it meant to be an American, we! are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together." Lamm said, "I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to ensure that we have
various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities."

"Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high school."

"My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of 'Victimology.' I would get all minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all
minority failure on the majority population."

"My sixth plan for America's downfall would include dual citizenship, and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. "E. Pluribus Unum" -- From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on the 'pluribus' instead of the 'Unum,' we will balkanize America as surely as Kosovo."

"Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits; make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of 'diversity.' I would find a word similar to 'heretic' in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like 'racist' or 'xenophobe' halt discussion and debate. Having made America a bilingual/bicultural country, having established multi-culturism, having the large foundations fund the! doctrine of 'Victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them."

In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound silence followed. Finally he said,. "Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis's book "Mexifornia." His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America. If you feel America. deserves to be destroyed, don't read that book."

There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference Every American in that room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today.

Discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate 'diversity.' American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a Third World in America - take note of California and other states - to date, ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell's book "1984." In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of Truth building: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance is strength."

Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don't get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.


56% Oppose Justice Department’s Blocking of Texas Voter ID Law - Rasmussen Reports™ OBAMA'S AGENDA OF GETTING THE ILLEGALS' VOTES!

56% Oppose Justice Department’s Blocking of Texas Voter ID Law - Rasmussen Reports™

FORECLOSED ON AMERICAN - OBAMA & HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS and the LOOTING of AMERICA



FORECLOSED ON AMERICA – OBAMA AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS ARE STILL LOOTING US AND PROTECTED BY THE BANKSTER BOUGHT AND OWNED OBAMA!

THE WASHINGTON POST
3-15-2012

HUD’s foreclosure report
By Michelle Singletary
A federal report released this week found that employees at major banks who forged signatures, made up fake job titles and falsely notarized paperwork often did so because they were ordered to by their bosses, reported The Washington Post’s Brady Dennis.
The report issued by the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that illegal foreclosure practices were not just encouraged at the direction of managers at the banks, but some employees were judged by how fast they could move along foreclosures, Dennis reported.
“Investigators pieced together a picture of a deeply flawed system riddled with errors, where employees often had little or no training, where managers encouraged wrongdoing and where haste trumped all else,” Dennis wrote.
In one review of 36 foreclosure filings, JPMorgan Chase was only able to provide documents showing the amount the borrowers owed in four of the cases. Of those, three proved inaccurate, investigators said.
As Dennis wrote: “I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question: How could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” David Montoya, HUD inspector general, said in a statement. “The answer: simple greed.”
Montoya is right and wrong.
He’s right that greed is at the center of all this foreclosure mess and the scandal that led five major banks -- — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial -- to settle charges that they were falsifying foreclosure documents.
But he’s wrong that many people will give a hoot about the HUD report that the bankers were “robo-signing” legal papers certifying that they had personal knowledge of the facts of a foreclosure when they did not. No, harsh, unsympathetic, self-righteous judgment is what I hear for people who have been or are being pushed out of their homes. It doesn’t seem to matter that many people are struggling to pay their mortgage because they lost their job or suffered an illness. Based on the mail I get every time I write about efforts to help homeowners facing foreclosure, many people are far harder on struggling individuals than on the financial companies that caused the housing bust.  


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Supervisors directed banks’ mortgage misconduct, HUD report says

By Brady Dennis, Published: March 13

Employees at major banks who churned out fraudulent foreclosure documents, forged signatures, made up fake job titles and falsely notarized paperwork often did so at the behest of their superiors, according to a federal investigation released Tuesday.

It’s well documented that the nation’s biggest banks routinely “robo-signed” legal papers to keep up with the wave of foreclosures brought on by the housing bust. But the new report from the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development reveals that those shoddy practices often came at the direction of managers at the banks, and that employees in some cases were judged by how fast they could get new foreclosure filings out the door.

“I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question: How could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” David Montoya, HUD inspector general, said in a statement. “The answer: simple greed.”

HUD investigators launched their inquiries soon after news of the banks’ practices caused a national uproar in late 2010, and government officials used their findings as they negotiated a recent landmark $25 billion settlement with the banks.

HUD reviewed foreclosure practices at all five banks involved in the recent settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. They issued subpoenas, pored over personnel files, conducted interviews with scores of employees and examined the quality control measures — or lack thereof — at the banks’ mortgage servicing units.

Repeatedly, according to the report, investigators were hampered by poor record-keeping at the banks, sluggish responses to requests for documents and an unwillingness to make employees available for interviews or to allow them to answer detailed questions at the virtual foreclosure factories where they worked.

Nevertheless, investigators pieced together a picture of a deeply flawed system riddled with errors, where employees often had little or no training, where managers encouraged wrongdoing and where haste trumped all else.

At Bank of America, for instance, performance reviews revealed that employees often were judged based on how quickly they worked and how many files they churned through, the HUD report stated. One manager noted in an employee review: “Your stats so far this year are as follows: Affidavits 46.97 per hour (standard is 49 per hour), Assignments 54.74 per hour (standard is 51 per hour) and DocEx 49.67 per hour (standard is 46 per hour).”

At Chase, operations supervisors “routinely signed foreclosure documents, including affidavits, certifying that they had personal knowledge of the facts when they did not,” nor did those supervisors bother to verify the accuracy of the documents they signed, according to the report.

In addition, the supervisors said in interviews with HUD officials that they often signed affidavits as an “assistant secretary” or “vice president” of Chase, when those were not their official titles. Rather, they were given those titles by Chase for the sole purpose of allowing them to sign legal documents. The titles came with no other duties or authority, the report said.

In one review of 36 foreclosure filings, Chase was able to provide documents showing the amount the borrowers presumably owed in only four of the cases. Of those, three proved inaccurate, investigators said.

At Wells Fargo, according to the report, numerous employees hired as so-called robo-signers had little or no education beyond high school and little or no experience in banking or real estate. One employee with the title of “vice president of loan documentation” had previously worked at a pizza restaurant and as a bank teller. Another had been a department store cashier and a day-care worker.

At Wells Fargo, the report said, employees faced ever-shrinking time frames to process the tidal wave of paperwork. In one March 2008 e-mail, employees were told that they would be required to sign the more than 100 affidavits they received at 9 a.m. each day by noon the same day.

One mid-level manager at the bank told investigators that she discreetly undertook a two-week study in which she and her staff actually read and verified the documents before signing them. Her goal, she said, was “to conclusively show that her department was understaffed and what staffing level would be required to properly prepare and sign the affidavits.”

Within a few days, however, higher-level managers noticed a growing paperwork backlog. “The midlevel manager was directed to stop the study and return to the practice of signing affidavits without reading or verifying data,” the HUD report said.

At Citigroup, some employees told investigators that they signed as many as 200 documents a day and that the numbers grew over time. One employee “indicated that he would sometimes receive 1- to 2-inch stacks of documents multiple times in a day,” the report said.

At Ally Financial, one employee “routinely” signed 400 foreclosure affidavits per day and up to 10,000 affidavits per month, and notaries routinely approved documents for which they didn’t witness the signatures.

“The memorandum references activities from over a year ago that have been addressed as we do all we can to modify loans when possible and to ensure foreclosures are fair when they are unavoidable,” Bank of America spokesman Rick Simon said in response to the HUD report’s findings.

Citigroup responded that the bank has strengthened the way it processes foreclosures. “Since 2007, Citi has worked hard to help families in their efforts to avoid potential foreclosure and stay in their homes,” the bank said in a statement. “Further, as the volume of foreclosures increased in 2009, Citi self-identified opportunities to improve its foreclosure processes and proactively undertook actions to enhance its policies and controls. These included: consolidating operations into one central unit; significantly reinforcing the size and training of our staff; and tightening control processes.”

The long-awaited settlement with the banks filed Monday in federal court is intended in part to end the unsavory practices detailed by HUD investigators. In addition to the $25 billion designated to help struggling borrowers and compensate foreclosed homeowners, the deal includes measures aimed at forcing banks to overhaul the way they pursue foreclosure cases and the way they deal with homeowners hoping to modify loans.

The settlement, which must be decided on by a federal judge, also creates a full-time monitor’s position to oversee and enforce the terms of the agreement if banks fail to make the required changes.

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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/02/foreclosed-on-america-obama-his-crimnal.html

FORECLOSED ON AMERICAN – OBAMA & HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS AT WORK WITH THE HELP OF HIS CLOSEST AND MOST CORRUPT DEMOCRATS.

THE FIRST DAY OF OBAMA’S ADMINISTRATION HE WENT ABOUT BUILDING HIS ADMINISTRATION WITH ADVOCATES FOR OPEN BORDERS AND LA RAZA SUPREMACY, INCLUDING PUTTING FORMER MEXIFORNIA CONGRESSWOMAN (LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY) IN AS SEC. OF ILLEGAL LABOR. THEN OBAMA SURROUNDED HIMSELF WITH BUSH’S MOST CORRUPT WALL ST ADVISORS, INCLUDING BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR NO-STRINGS BANKSTERS’ BAILOUTS, TIM GEITHNER.

THEN OBAMA MADE SURE TWO OF THE MOST BANKSTER-BOUGHT CORRUPT DEMS, CHRIS DODD AND BARNEY FRANK WERE BROUGHT IN TO MAKE SURE THERE WOULD BE NO REAL BANKSTER REFORM. WHAT LITTLE “REFORM” DID COME OUT OF IT THE BANKSTERS ARE NOW NEUTERING AS THEY PULL IN BILLIONS IN PROFITS!

NOT ONE CRIMINAL BANKSTER HAS GONE TO PRISON!

IN FACT, UNDER OBAMA, THINGS ARE LOOKING QUITE ROSY!

WHILE OBAMA WAS A SENATOR, THE BANKSTERS WERE TAKING MEASURES TO MAKE SURE THEIR TOXIC MORTGAGES COULD NOT BE EASILY REWOUND IN BANKRUPTCY COURTS. THEY USED ONE OF THE SENATE’S GREATEST WHORES, SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN TO FRONT THEIR “BANKSTERS’ BANKRUPTCY REFORM”, PUTTING BANKS ABOVE CONSUMER RIGHTS.
TWO OF BUSH’S WAR PROFITEER, DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S BIGGEST DONORS ARE BANK of AMERICA and WELLS FARGO (WHICH IS BANKSTERS TO THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS). AT THE TIME FEINSTEIN WAS SERVICING HER BANKSTERS, WELLS FARGO HAD ALREADY HAD THEIR CALIFORNIA MORTGAGE LICENSE REVOKED IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA FOR MORTGAGE FRAUD, AND CORPORATE MALFEASANCE. IN 2003 WELLS FARGO WENT INTO OPEN COURT DEMANDING THEIR CA MORTGAGE LICENSE BE REINSTATED. THE COURTS REFUSED! IT REMAINS REVOKED TO THIS DAY!

WELLS FARGO SIMPLY DECLARED ITSELF ABOVE STATE LAW, AND WHAT BANKS DON’T OPERATE ABOVE THE LAW? AND WENT ON MARKETING THEIR TOXIC MORTGAGES AROUND THE NATION, AND IN SO DOING CAUSING COMMUNITIES TO ULTIMATELY GO INTO MELTDOWN FROM IT!

FEINSTEIN’S PAYMASTERS AT BANK of AMERICAN and WELLS FARGO WERE ALSO MAKING HEFTY FEES HANDING LA RAZA ILLEGALS MORTGAGES BASED ON FRAUD DOCS, AND STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. THEN THE BANKS DUMPED THESE ON UNSUSPECTING INVESTORS, KNOWING IT WOULD BE THE TAX PAYERS THAT ULTIMATELY WOULD EAT IT AS ALWAYS.

FORECLOSURES ARE HIGHEST IN STATES WITH THE LARGEST NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. CA IS NOW HALF LA RAZA, NEVADA IS NOW ONE-THIRD ILLEGAL, ARIZONA HAS MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS!

FOLLOWING FEINSTEIN’S PUSH FOR “BANKSTER BOUGHT BANKRUPTCY REFORM, AND VOTING FOR THE BANKS WAS HILARY CLINTON, BARBARA BOXER, JOE BIDEN, AND VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE LIST OF THE MOST CORRUPT DEMS IN CONGRESS. ALL ARE ALSO ADVOCATES FOR OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, AND LA RAZA DREAM ACTS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND THEIR CORPORATE PAYMASTERS HAPPY AND GENEROUS!

OBAMA DID NOT VOTE FOR THE “BANKRUPTCY REFORM”… AND EVEN STATED AS ONE OF HIS CAMPAIGN LIES AS HE DANCED HIS “CHANGE” TUNE TO A GUILABLE NATION, THAT HE WOULD RESTORE CONSUMERS’ RIGHTS AGAINST THE BANKSTER IN BANKRUPTCY COURTS!

IF OBAMA DOES ONE THING WELL OTHER THAN PERFORM AS A POPULIST, IT’S LIE AND GO LIMP WHEN HE’S TOLD BY HIS WALL ST PAYMASTERS.

OBAMA COULDN’T HAND THESE BANKSTER ANY AND ALL THEY WANTED FAST ENOUGH!!! HE HANDED OUT THEIR LOOTINGS WITH NO-STRINGS!

BOTH WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA WERE HANDED NO-STRINGS WELFARE WHICH THEY TURNED AROUND AND BOUGHT OTHER BANKSTERS WITH! WELLS FARGO HAS MADE MASSIVE PROFITS IN FORECLOSURE FEES THEY CAUSED EVEN HAS COMMUNITIES NATIONWIDE PAY OFF THE STAGGERING COST OF FORECLOSURE MELTDOWNS.

OBAMA NEVER DID STAND UP TO THE BANKSTERS LIKE HE PROMISED, BUT THEN THIS IS THE CLOWN THAT LIED ABOUT OBAMAcare NOT INCLUDING ILLEGALS!!!

PROBABLY THE ONLY HONEST THING OBAMA HAS EVER SAID AS PRESIDENT WAS ON THE SENATE FLOOR, STATE of the UNION MESSAGE:

“I’m not here to punish banks!”

NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS THAN OBAMA! WHEN ASKED IN AN INTERVIEW AT THE WHITE HOUSE WHY HE HAD NOT GONE AFTER THE BANKS, OBAMA QUICKLY BLAMED THE HOLDER DEPT. of JUSTICE FOR NOT DOING ANYTHING… THE SAME LA RAZA DEPT OF JUSTICE OBAMA HAS USED TO SUE FOUR STATES, SABOTAGE E-VERIFY TO HELP PUT ILLEGALS IN OUR JOBS, AND FIGHT AGAINST ILLEGALS HAVING TO PRODUCE NON-FRAUDULENT IDs BEFORE THEY VOTE!!! WE KNOW WHO HOLDER WORKS FOR JUST AS WE KNOW WHO OBAMA WORKS FOR… LA RAZA and the BANKSTERS!

DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS ONE THE MOST CORRUPT POLITICIANS IN AMERICAN HISTORY. SHE HAS HANDED OVER BIG CAMPAIGN BRIBES TO CORRUPT DEMS AROUND THE COUNTRY TO ASSURE THEIR COOPERATION IN SABOTAGING ANY SENATE ETHICS INVESTIGATIONS INTO HER CRIMES. FEINSTEIN AND BOXER HAVE VOTED AGAINST ANY AND ALL SENATE CORRUPTION REFORMS.  FEINSTEIN’S BRIBES HAVE BEEN PAID OUT TO BOXER, CLINTON, KERRY, JOE LIEBERMAN, THE OTHER WAR WHORE, AND OF COURSE, BARACK OBAMA!

WE KNEW THERE WOULD BE NO “CHANGE” WHEN OBAMA HAD FEINSTEIN, BUSH’S WAR PROFITEER, GIVE HALF OF THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS WITH HER PIMP HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM, SITTING RIGHT BEHIND OBAMA ON THE INAGURAL STAND.

FEINSTEIN, A LA RAZA ENDORSED ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, NO ENGLISH ONLY, NO I.D. REQUIRED OF ILLEGALS VOTING, HIRES ILLEGALS TO WORK CHEAP AT HER S.F. HOTEL, ONLY MILES FROM HER $16 MILLION DOLLAR WAR PROFITS MANSION.

FEINSTEIN’S LA RAZA PARTNER, NANCY PELOSI ALSO HAS LONG HIRED ILLEGALS TO WORK CHEAP AT HER ST. HELENA, NAPA WINERY. PELOSI ALSO LIED THROUGH HER TEETH ABOUT ILLEGALS NOT BEING PART OF OBAMACARE.

LA RAZA DEMS FEINSTEIN AND BOXER (WHO WAS REELECTED WITH THE VOTES OF ILLEGALS, AS HARRY REID WAS IN NEVADA), HAVE ON BEHALF OF THEIR BIG AG BIZ DONORS, PUSHED THREE (3) TIMES FOR A “SPECIAL AMNESTY” FOR 1.5 MILLION MEXICAN FARM SLAVE LABORERS, DESPITE THE FACT THAT ONE-THIRD OF ALL ILLEGAL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE.

FEINSTEIN’S STATE OF CA PAYS OUT $20 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICE COSTS TO LA RAZA!

DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS IN OFFICE, THE BANKS PULLED IN MORE PROFITS THAN THEY DID DURING ALL EIGHT YEARS UNDER BUSH.

FORECLOSURES ARE ALSO SOARING!

OBAMA, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI AND REID HAVE ALL MADE JUDICIAL WATCH’S 10 MOST CORRUPT LIST! JUDICIAL WATCH.org

*

OBAMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY BETWEEN THE ACTOR PRESIDENT, AND HIS BANKSTER DONORS!

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).

NEW YORK TIMES

February 4, 2012

A Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded



YEARS before the housing bust — before all those home loans turned sour and millions of Americans faced foreclosure — a wealthy businessman in Florida set out to blow the whistle on the mortgage game.

His name is Nye Lavalle, and he first came to attention not in finance but in sports and advertising. He turned heads in marketing circles by correctly predicting that Nascar and figure skating would draw huge followings in the 1990s.

But after losing a family home to foreclosure, under what he thought were fishy circumstances, Mr. Lavalle, founder of a consulting firm called the Sports Marketing Group, began a new life as a mortgage sleuth. In 2003, when home prices were flying high, he compiled a dossier of improprieties on one of the giants of the business, Fannie Mae.

In hindsight, what he found looks like a blueprint of today’s foreclosure crisis. Even then, Mr. Lavalle discovered, some loan-servicing companies that worked for Fannie Mae routinely filed false foreclosure documents, not unlike the fraudulent paperwork that has since made “robo-signing” a household term. Even then, he found, the nation’s electronic mortgage registry was playing fast and loose with the law — something that courts have belatedly recognized, too.

You might wonder why Mr. Lavalle didn’t speak up. But he did. For two years, he corresponded with Fannie executives and lawyers. Fannie later hired a Washington law firm to investigate his claims. In May 2006, that firm, using some of Mr. Lavalle’s research, issued a confidential, 147-page report corroborating many of his findings.

And there, apparently, is where it ended. There is little evidence that Fannie Mae’s management or board ever took serious action. Known internally as O.C.J. Case No. 5595, in reference to the company’s Office of Corporate Justice, this 2006 report suggests just how deep, and how far back, our mortgage and foreclosure problems really go.

“It is axiomatic that the practice of submitting false pleadings and affidavits is unlawful,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “With his complaint, Mr. Lavalle has identified an issue that Fannie Mae needs to address promptly.”

What Fannie Mae knew about abusive foreclosure practices, and when it knew it, are crucial questions as Congress and the Obama administration weigh the future of the company and its cousin, Freddie Mac. These giants eventually blew themselves apart and, so far, they have cost taxpayers $150 billion. But before that, their size and reach — not only through their own businesses, but also through the vast amount of work they farm out to law firms and loan servicers — meant that Fannie and Freddie shaped the standards for the entire mortgage industry.

Almost all of the abuses that Mr. Lavalle began identifying in 2003 have since come to widespread attention. The revelations have roiled the mortgage industry and left Fannie, Freddie and big banks with potentially enormous legal liabilities. More worrying is that the kinds of problems that Mr. Lavalle flagged so long ago, and that Fannie apparently ignored, have evicted people from their homes through improper or fraudulent foreclosures.

Until a few weeks ago, Mr. Lavalle, 54, had never seen O.C.J. 5595. He had hoped to get a copy after helping Fannie’s lawyers, at Baker & Hostetler in Washington, complete it. He didn’t.

But after learning about its findings from a reporter for The Times, Mr. Lavalle said, “Fannie Mae, its directors, servicers and lawyers appeared to have an institutional policy of turning a willful blind eye to evidence of mortgage origination and servicing fraud.”

He went on: “When confronted directly with this evidence, Fannie not only failed to correct and remedy the abuses, it assisted in continuing the frauds via institutional practices that concealed fraudulent foreclosures.”

A spokesman for Fannie Mae said in a statement last week that the company quickly addressed several issues that were raised in the 2006 report and that it took action on other issues associated with foreclosures in 2010. “We want to prevent foreclosure whenever possible, but when foreclosures cannot be avoided they must move forward in a timely, appropriate fashion,” he said.

Fannie Mae would not say whether it had shared O.J.C. 5595 with its board of directors or its regulator, then known as the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. James B. Lockhart III, who headed that regulator in 2006, said he did not recall reading the report. “I probably did not see it as back then foreclosures were not a very big deal,” he said.

But another report published last fall by the inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the current regulator, briefly mentioned some of the problems that Mr. Lavalle had raised. (It didn’t mention him by name.) It also faulted Fannie Mae, saying it failed to address foreclosure improprieties that had surfaced years before.

LIKE most people, Nye Lavalle had little interest in the mortgage industry until things got personal. Raised in comfortable surroundings in Grosse Pointe, Mich., just outside Detroit, he began his business career in the 1970s, managing professional tennis players. In the 1980s, he ran SMG, a thriving consulting and research firm.

Then he tried to pay off a loan on a home his family had bought in Dallas in 1988. The balance was roughly $100,000, and the property was valued at about $175,000, Mr. Lavalle said. But when he combed through figures provided by his lender, Savings of America, he found substantial discrepancies in the accounting that had inflated his bill by $18,000. The loan servicer had repeatedly charged him late fees for payments he had made on time, as well as for unnecessary appraisals and force-placed hazard insurance, he said.

Mr. Lavalle refused to pay. The bank refused to bend. The balance rose as the bank tacked on lawyers’ fees and the loan was deemed delinquent. The fight continued after his mortgage was allegedly sold to EMC, a Bear Stearns unit.

Unlike most people, Mr. Lavalle had the time and money to fight. He persuaded his family to help him pay for a lawsuit against EMC and Bear Stearns. Seven years and a small fortune later, they lost the house in Dallas. Back then, judges weren’t as interested in mortgage practices as some are now, he said.

The experience lit a fire. Mr. Lavalle set out to learn everything he could about the mortgage industry. In a five-hour interview in Naples, Fla., last month, he described his travels nationwide. He dove into mortgage arcana, land records and court filings. By 1996, he had identified what appeared to be forged signatures on foreclosure documents, foreshadowing troubles to come. He took his findings to big players in the industry: Banc One, Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Freddie Mac, JPMorgan, Washington Mutual and others. A few responded but later said his claims were not valid, he said.

Now he splits his time between Orlando and Boca Raton, advising lawyers as an expert witness. “From my own personal experience and 20 years of research and investigation, nothing — and I mean nothing — that a bank, lender, loan servicer or their lawyer says or puts on paper can be trusted and accepted as true,” Mr. Lavalle said.

FANNIE MAE, now in government hands, has acknowledged how abusive foreclosure practices can hurt its own business. “The failure of our servicers or a law firm to apply prudent and effective process controls and to comply with legal and other requirements in the foreclosure process poses operational, reputational and legal risks for us,” it said in a 2010 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Five years earlier, Fannie seemed to have taken a different view. That was when Mr. Lavalle pointed out legal lapses by some of its representatives. Among them was the law offices of David J. Stern, in Plantation, Fla., which was handling an astonishing 75,000 foreclosure cases a year — more than 200 a day. In 2005, Mr. Lavalle warned Fannie Mae that some judges had ruled that the Stern firm was submitting “sham pleadings.” Nonetheless, Fannie continued to do business with the firm until it closed its doors last year, after evidence emerged of rampant forgeries and fraudulent filings.

O.C.J. Case No. 5595 found that Stern wasn’t the only firm working for Fannie that seemed to be cutting corners. It also found that lawyers operating in seven other states — Connecticut, Georgia, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, Kentucky and Ohio — had made false filings in connection with work for Fannie Mae or the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a private mortgage registry Fannie helped establish in 1995.

“While Fannie Mae officials do not have a single opinion, some officials believe foreclosure counsel are sacrificing accuracy for speed,” the report said.

The lawyers at Baker & Hostetler did not agree with everything Mr. Lavalle said. Mark A. Cymrot, a partner who led the investigation, discounted Mr. Lavalle’s fear that Fannie could lose billions if large numbers of foreclosures had to be unwound as a result of misconduct by its lawyers and servicers.

Even so, the report didn’t conclude that Mr. Lavalle was wrong on the legal issues. It simply said that few people would have the financial resources to challenge foreclosures. In other words, few people would be like Mr. Lavalle.

“Courts are unlikely to unwind foreclosures unless borrowers can demonstrate that the foreclosure would not have gone forward with the correct pleadings, which is a difficult burden for most borrowers to meet,” the report said. “Nevertheless, the issues Mr. Lavalle raises should be addressed promptly in order to mitigate the risk of exposure to lawsuits and some degree of liability.” Mr. Cymrot declined to comment for this article.

O.C.J. 5595 also questioned Mr. Lavalle’s contention that improprieties by loan servicers were pervasive. But based on interviews with 30 Fannie employees, the report conceded that the company had no mechanism to ensure that servicers were charging borrowers appropriate fees.

Other oversight at Fannie was similarly lacking, the Baker & Hostetler lawyers found. For instance, when Fannie identified fraud by a lender or servicer, it didn’t notify the homeowner. Nor did it police activities of lawyers or servicers it hired. As a result, the report said, Fannie might not be insulated from liability for their misconduct.

Lewis D. Lowenfels, a securities law expert, said he was perplexed that Fannie’s board appeared to have done nothing to correct these practices. “If it had been brought to the board’s attention that specific acts of illegality were being committed, it should have directed that relationships with the transgressors be terminated forthwith and Fannie Mae’s regulator be advised accordingly,” he said.

Daniel H. Mudd, Fannie’s chief executive at the time, declined to comment through his lawyer. Mr. Mudd was recently sued by the S.E.C., accused of failing to disclose Fannie’s participation in the subprime mortgage market.

PERHAPS no development has done more to obscure the forces behind the foreclosure epidemic than the rise of the MERS, the private registry that has all but replaced public land ownership records. Created by Fannie, Freddie and big banks, MERS claims to hold title to roughly half the nation’s home mortgages. Judges and lawmakers have questioned MERS’s legal authority to initiate foreclosures, and some judges have thrown out foreclosures brought in its name. On Friday, New York’s attorney general sued MERS, contending that its system led to fraudulent foreclosure filings. MERS refuted the claims and said it would fight.

Mr. Lavalle warned Fannie years ago that MERS couldn’t legally foreclose because it didn’t actually own notes underlying properties.

The report agreed. MERS’s approach of letting loan servicers foreclose in its own name, not in that of institutions owning the notes, “is not accepted legal practice in all states,” the report said. Moreover, “MERS’s counsel conceded false allegations are routinely made, and the practice should be ‘modified.’ ”

It continued: “To our knowledge, MERS has not addressed the issue of its counsels’ repeated false statements to the courts.”

Janis L. Smith, a spokeswoman for MERS, said it had not seen the Baker & Hostetler report and declined comment on its references to the false statements made on its behalf to the courts. She said that MERS’s business model is legal in all states and that as a nominee, it has the right to foreclose. MERS stopped allowing its members to foreclose in its name in all states in 2011.

Robert D. Drain, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York, said in court last month that the failure of the mortgage industry to deal with pervasive problems involving inaccurate documentation and improper court filings amounted to “the greatest failure of lawyering in the last 50 years.”

In an interview last week, Judge Drain said several practices have contributed to the foreclosure mess. One is that Fannie and the rest of the industry failed to ensure that MERS was operating legally in all states. Another is that the industry failed to perform due diligence on documentation.

MERS no longer participates in foreclosures. But a lot of damage has already been done, Mr. Lavalle said.

“Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures in Florida and across America were knowingly conducted unlawfully, for which there are still severe liabilities and implications to come for many years,” he said.

THERE was a time when Americans had mortgage-burning parties: When they paid off a promisory note, they celebrated by burning the release of the lien.

But they kept the canceled promissory note — and there was a reason for that. Promissory notes, like dollar bills, are negotiable currency. Whoever holds them can essentially claim them.

According to O.C.J. Case No. 5595, Fannie held roughly two million mortgage notes in its offices in Herndon, Va., in 2005 — a fraction of the 15 million loans it actually owned or guaranteed. Who had the rest? Various third parties.

At that time, Fannie typically destroyed 40 percent of the notes once the mortgages were paid off. It returned the rest to the respective lenders, only without marking the notes as canceled.

Mr. Lavalle and the internal report raised concerns that Fannie wasn’t taking enough care in handling these documents. The company lacked a centralized system for reporting lost notes, for instance. Nor did custodians or loan servicers that held notes on its behalf report missing notes to homeowners.

The potential for mayhem, the report said, was serious. Anyone who gains control of a note can, in theory, try to force the borrower to pay it, even if it has already been paid. In such a case, “the borrower would have the expensive and unenviable task of trying to collect from the custodian that was negligent in losing the note, from the servicer that accepted payments, or from others responsible for the predicament,” the report stated. Mr. Lavalle suggested that Fannie return the paid notes to borrowers after stamping them “canceled.” Impractical, the 2006 report said.

This leaves open the possibility that someone might try to force homeowners to pay the same mortgage twice. Or that loans could be improperly pledged as collateral by some other institution, even though the loans have been paid, Mr. Lavalle said. Indeed, there have been instances in the foreclosure crisis when two different institutions laid claim to the same mortgage note.

In its statement last week, Fannie said it quickly addressed questions of lost note affidavits and issued guidance to servicers that no judicial foreclosures be conducted in MERS’s name. It also said it instructed Florida foreclosure lawyers “to use specific language to assure no confusion over the identity of the ‘owner’ and the ’holder’ of the note.”

The 2006 report said Mr. Lavalle at times came across as over the top, that he was, in its words, “partial to extreme analogies that undermine his credibility.” Knowing what we know now, he looks more like one of the financial Cassandras of our time — a man whose prescient warnings went unheeded.

Now, he hopes dubious mortgage practices will be eradicated.

“Any attorney general, lawyer, bank director, judge, regulator or member of Congress who does not open their eyes to the abuse, ask pertinent questions and allow proper investigation and discovery,” he said, “is only assisting in the concealment of what may be the fraud of our lifetime.”

*
Obama's Wall Street cabinet

6 April 2009

A series of articles published over the weekend, based on financial disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday concerning top White House officials, documents the extent to which the administration, in both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.

Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions, and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.

At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.

The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous character of relations between the Obama administration and the American financial elite.

Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.

For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and “unsustainable” wages.

Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”

Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation of hedge funds.”

Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.

Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.

Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.

David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.

Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.

Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.

The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.

Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.

Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.

It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from industry than from finance.

In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.

This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.

Alongside Wall Street, the Obama cabinet is dominated by the military, including three recently retired four-star military officers: former Marine General James Jones as national security adviser; Admiral Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence, and former Army Chief of Staff Erik Shinseki as secretary of veterans’ affairs.

These are the deeply reactionary political and class interests that are represented by the Obama administration.

Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war—only through a break with the two parties of American capitalism and the development of a mass, independent socialist movement.

Tom Eley and Barry Grey

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Obama’s Economic Advisers: International Socialists, Union Thugs, NBC Execs, Soros Scholars, Subprime Lenders, Amnesty Shills, and Campaign Cronies


Posted on February 24, 2011 by Ben Johnson



Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses


BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY


Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
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Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.

*

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

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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).

BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS JOHN McCAIN

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL

DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

July 1st 2008

Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg

Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.

Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily News analysis of campaign records shows.


GOLDMAN SACHS IS A MAJOR OBAMA DONOR!

 “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).”
TO WORK IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, ONE MUST COME FROM SOME CRIMINAL WALL ST BANKSTER, OR BE A MEMBER OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA!

DO A SEARCH ON THE BLOG FOR OBAMA’S SEC. of LABOR HILDA SOLIS, CECELIA MUNOZ AND HIS “WISE LATINA” LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER SONIA SOTOMAYER!

 “It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.”

An insider’s view of Wall Street criminality

15 March 2012

Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation Wednesday in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, denouncing the bank's “toxic” culture of avarice and fraud.

Smith headed the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In his column, entitled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” he describes a corporate environment that encourages and rewards big short-term returns gained through the bilking of clients and the general public. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” he writes.

Speaking of one’s clients as “muppets” and describing deal-making as “ripping eyeballs out” are commonplace at Goldman, according to Smith. The way to advance at the Wall Street giant, he writes, is to persuade your clients “to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of,” get your clients “to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman,” and trade “any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”

The column describes an operation in which laws and regulations requiring financial institutions to deal honestly with their clients and protect their interests are routinely violated. The insider’s indictment of Goldman Sachs highlights a broader process—the criminalization of American capitalism as a whole.

It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.

Education, health care, pensions are being gutted, wages are being slashed and more austerity is on the agenda because there is supposedly “no money.” Corporate profits and CEO pay, meanwhile, are setting new records.

This is an indictment not simply of Goldman Sachs, or even Wall Street alone, but rather the entire economic and political system. Every official institution—the White House, Congress, the courts, the media, the Democratic and Republican parties—is complicit.

Smith’s column was widely reported in the media. NBC Nightly News led its report Wednesday night with the story, interviewing a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who was brought on to deplore the type of practices described by the former Goldman executive. The ruling class is well aware that popular anger against Wall Street is rising and capitalism itself is becoming increasingly discredited in the eyes of millions of Americans—a process that found an initial expression in the Occupy Wall Street protests. It is concerned that Smith’s piece will further fuel this sentiment.

The practices to which Smith points—and worse—are well known to the Obama administration and the financial regulatory agencies. In April of last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a 640-page report outlining in detail the fraudulent and illegal practices of major banks that contributed to the September 2008 crash. Fully 260 pages of that report were devoted to Goldman Sachs. They explained chapter and verse, giving dates and naming names, how the bank defrauded its clients by selling them mortgage securities while betting against the same investments, without telling them it was doing so.

The committee also documented the complicity of the credit rating firms and federal regulators in the colossal mortgage Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2007-2008, setting off a new world depression. It cited securities laws that had been violated by Goldman and two other banks it examined, Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, and referred this information to the Obama administration’s Justice Department.

The response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.

One Wall Street firm after another—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial—has been allowed to settle charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission out of court, paying token fines while admitting no wrongdoing. That this continues is seen in the filing Monday in federal court of the sweetheart settlement between five major banks and the state and federal governments of charges arising from the banks’ illegal processing of foreclosures. The banks have merely to pay a combined fine of $5 billion for illegally throwing thousands of families out of their homes, with no admission of wrongdoing. In return, they get the quashing of state investigations that threatened to result in tens of billions in damages and fines.

Not only does the Obama administration protect the Wall Street criminals, it includes their representatives among its top personnel. To cite some examples:

* Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

* Dianna Farrell, former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, is deputy director of the National Economic Council.

* Jacob Lew, Obama’s chief of staff, was a top executive at Citigroup. He follows two other bankers chosen by Obama to head his White House operations—former JPMorgan executive William Daley and former Chicago investment banker Rahm Emanuel.

The criminalization of the American corporate-financial elite cannot be separated from the capitalist system itself. It is the product of a decades-long process of crisis and decay, in which the ruling elite has increasingly separated its wealth-making from the production of real value.

Manufacturing and the productive infrastructure have been decimated, while financial manipulation and speculation have come to dominate economic life. The working class has suffered a catastrophic decline in its social position at the same time that a parasitic financial aristocracy has come to exercise a de facto dictatorship over the political system.

Like all aristocracies, the American financial elite will not accept any infringement of its wealth and power. The working class must break its grip by mobilizing its strength in opposition to both parties of Wall Street and fighting for the establishment of a workers’ government and socialist policies, beginning with the nationalization of the banks and corporations and their transformation into public enterprises under the democratic control of the working people.

Andre Damon and Barry Grey

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