Occupy Wall Street: Macing Protesters, Chris Hedges and Michael Moore

Olbermann interviews Michael Moore who says, “I think there needs to be a multi-pronged approach” urging civil disobedience locally as well as nationally, and refusing to move out under a foreclosure notice since no one owns your mortgage any more.  “The banks lost them,” he says, when they bundled them into their little Ponzie schemes.

Beyond ForeclosureGate – It Gets Uglier

Michael Collins

The ForeclosureGate scandal poses a threat to Wall Street, the big banks, and the political establishment. If the public ever gets a complete picture of the personal, financial, and legal assault on citizens at their most vulnerable, the outrage will be endless. (Image)

Foreclosure practices lift the veil on a broader set of interlocking efforts to exploit those hardest hit by the endless economic hard times, citizens who become financially desperate due medical conditions. A 2007 study found that medical expenses or income losses related to medical crises among bankruptcy filers or family members triggered 62% of bankruptcies. There is no underground conspiracy. The facts are in plain sight.

ForeclosureGate represents the sum total illegal and unethical lending and collections activities during the real estate bubble. It continues today. Law professor and law school dean Christopher L. Peterson describes the contractual language for the sixty million contracts between borrowers and lenders as fictional since the boilerplate language names a universal surrogate as creditor (Mortgage Electronic Registration System), not the actual creditor. Other aspects of ForeclosureGate harmed homeowners but the contractual problems that the lenders created on their own pose the greatest threats.

What Libertarians and Progressives have in common

PressTV interview with Journalist and Blogger David DeGraw

Libertarians know and hate the Federal Reserve. They hate Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan. But they are not willing to go to the poor people who are being forced to pay for the crimes of those people that they hate because it’s a union or because there may be some Democrats involved in it.  Libertarians and progressives can find common ground, but at this point still they are refusing to step back and concede a little bit to find it. They have to come together on campaign finance and lobbying and most importantly they can come together on breaking up the banks.

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

(Victor Juhasz)

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stones

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.” I put down my notebook. “Just that?” “That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industry-wide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted.

Iceland Proves Ireland Did `Wrong Things’ Sacrificing Taxpayers

By Yalman Onaran
Bloomberg

Unlike other nations, including the U.S. and Ireland, which injected billions of dollars of capital into their financial institutions to keep them afloat, Iceland placed its biggest lenders in receivership. It chose not to protect creditors of the country’s banks, writes Yalman Onaran.

Why Does Congress Hate America?

By Michael Collins

Oh, it’s just that Collins guy mouthing off again.

Actually, I was far too easy on Congress yesterday in Lawless Nation – Congress.

Here’s why: HR 3808 The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010

The bill is the response to the events outlined in a story that Numerian scooped on foreclosure problems. The banks are in big trouble. They failed to follow the law and rules in handling mortgages. Instead of foreclosing on home owners, those upside down and under water can consider strategic defaults on the mishandled notes. Legal efforts have reached a point where there’s a “tsunami of legal action against mortgage servicers” as Tyler Durden calls it.

Class War: Land Grab Foreclosures

Compiled by Rady Ananda 

Woman’s Home Confiscated Over Small Water Bill
The Other Foreclosure Menace
By Fred Schulte, Ben Protess and Lagan Sebert
One raw day in early February, Vicki Valentine stood by helplessly as real estate investors snatched her West Baltimore home over what began with an unpaid city water bill of $362.

HUD Is Trying to Privatize and Mortgage off All of America’s Public Housing
By George Lakoff
The Obama Administration’s move to the right is about to give conservatives a victory they could not have anticipated, even under Bush. HUD, under Obama, submitted legislation called PETRA to Congress that would result in the privatization of all public housing in America.