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Submitted by Roanman on Fri, 02/10/2012 - 16:15

 

From American Banker via Zero Hedge.

 

Missing Settlement Document Raises Doubts on $25B Deal

 

 

More than a day after the announcement of a mammoth national mortgage servicing settlement, the actual terms of the deal still aren't public. The website created for the national settlement lists the document as "coming soon."

That's because a fully authorized, legally binding deal has not been inked yet.

The implication of this is hard to say. Spokespersons for both the Iowa attorney general's office and the Department of Justice both told American Banker that the actual settlement will not be made public until it is submitted to a court. A representative for the North Carolina attorney general downplayed the significance of the document's non-final status, saying that the terms were already fixed.

"Once the documents are finalized, they'll be posted to nationalmortgagesettlement.com," the representative said in an email to American Banker.

Other sources who spoke with American Banker raised doubts that everything is yet in place. A person familiar with the mortgage servicing pact says that a settlement term sheet does not yet exist. Instead, there are a series of nearly-complete documents that will be attached to a consent judgment eventually filed with the court. That truly final version will include things such as servicing standards, consumer relief options, legal releases, and enforcement terms. There will likely be separate state and a federal versions of the release.

Some who talked to American Banker said that the political pressure to announce the settlement drove the timing, in effect putting the press release cart in front of the settlement horse.

 

On the positive side, Tyler Durden is in rare form over this.

 

 

It is only appropriate, and so ironic, that a politically motivated settlement whose purpose is to squash any claims of pervasive defective document fraud (and contract law but just ask GM bondholders about that - it's hardly news) is itself found to be ... defective.

American Banker reports that the reason why the terms of the so-called historic (just ask the Teleprompter in Chief) foreclosure settlement deal are not public yet, is "because a fully authorized, legally binding deal has not been inked yet."

Wait, so America's cohort of AGs just all, pardon the pun, robosigned a piece of paper that does not exist?

Oh and anyone who had doubts that the settlement, which incidentally is paid for by you, dear taxpayers, in the form of bank bailout cash, of which the banks still owe over $10 billion in some capacity, was merely a political ploy to get taxpayers to fund Obama's reelection campaign by subsidizing squatters with $2,000 per vote in the presidential race come November, using banks as intermediaries to make the administration seem oh so powerful and daring to take on the banks, who in fact are the only ones benefiting from this farce, by holding a gun to the head of the hold out AGs forcing them to sign a piece of paper that does not even exist, this should put all those doubts to rest.

 

And just in case you have forgotten, here are just a few of the ubiquitous Linda Green's many signatures.

Click the image below for details.

 

 

The Top 12 Reasons to Hate the Mortgage Settlement

Submitted by Roanman on Thu, 02/09/2012 - 18:36

 

 

You probably should just stay away from this post unless you're already crabby.

Go to Naked Capitalism for the last eight.

 

Here are the top twelve reasons why this deal stinks:

 

 

1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.

3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.

4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.

 

I've checked none of this yet as I have plenty of stuff in front of this to make me crabby enough already, but I will.

 
 

John Dingell gets it right in 1999

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 01/31/2012 - 19:15

 

Too bad he goes to babbling a bit about privacy issues at the end of this speech, because John Dingell hits it out of the park ... with men on ... and then some ... during the 1999 debate on the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act.  

Which legislation repealed those portions of the Glass Steagall act that seperated institutions that take customer's deposits from investment banks and insurance companies.

Too big to fail said Mr. Dingell in 1999.

 

 

 

 

Click on the above cartoon to link up to Khalil Bendib who I think is the above artist as I can't read the name ... at Otherworld.org

 

 

What happened to Glass Steagall?

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 01/31/2012 - 19:15

 

In case your wondering what Glass Steagall is in the first place, this vid provides a simple and sufficient answer to that question.

In a nutshell Glass Steagall is the shorthand name for legislation passed in 1933 that was specifically designed to help prevent another stock market crash ala 1929 and subsequent depression ala "The Great Depression".

It worked like a charm too ...... right up until the moment it was repealed. 

Democrats are gonna hate this story as it totally blows up the notion that the powers that be within the Democrat party care one whit more about you than do those reprehensible fascists of the right.

If you take the time to watch this, you'll at least have an understanding of what hit you.

 

 

Your government at work for the banks ... part 2

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 01/21/2012 - 16:44

 

This from Reuters who unlike most of the rest of our national media, has recently awakened to the smell of coffee and is now rolling.

Ah well, better late than never.

Not a week goes by that somewhere in my reading somebody doesn't marvel that more than 3 years into this mess nobody is in jail or even under indictment for all of the fraud and basic malfeasance that has taken place at the banks.

Here's your likely answer.

As always click anywhere below for the entire story.

Highly educational.

 

Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks

 

 

(Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

Reuters reported in December that under Holder and Breuer, the Justice Department hasn't brought any criminal cases against big banks or other companies involved in mortgage servicing, even though copious evidence has surfaced of apparent criminal violations in foreclosure cases.

The evidence, including records from federal and state courts and local clerks' offices around the country, shows widespread forgery, perjury, obstruction of justice, and illegal foreclosures on the homes of thousands of active-duty military personnel.

 

Change you can believe in.

 

The Man Who Busted the Banksters

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 01/21/2012 - 06:41

 

I had never heard of Ferdinand Pecora.

The fact that his name is never mentioned in anybody's high school government class is a damnable shame.

He should have a day all his own in every government class at every school in every state of this union.

As an aside, his book is presently going for $550.00 at Amazon.

The following excerpt is taken from a short story at Smithsonian.com titled "The Man Who Busted The Banksters.

Click anywhere below for the entire piece.

Way super double highly recommended ..... plus ... and then some.

 

 

Just months before Hoover left office, Pecora was appointed chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency.  Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness.

“Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission.  Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves.  Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock ..... to his wife.  

Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors.  (Ever heard that one before?)  By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion.  “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”

 

Whoa, a regulator actually doing his job.

As opposed to a regulator spending his time working on his next job.

 

SOPA

Submitted by Roanman on Wed, 01/18/2012 - 06:07

 

The following is completely plagiarized from Wikipedia.

 

 

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as House Bill 3261 or H.R. 3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by House Judiciary Committee Chair Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors.

 

The bill, if made law, would expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.[2] Presented to the House Judiciary Committee, it builds on the similar PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act.[3]

 

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.

 

The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.[4]

 

 

 

Bipartisanship

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 01/14/2012 - 16:42

 

The great conceit amongst the great unwashed (that would be us) is as follows, “If we can just get our guys elected, then everything will be Ok.” 

Among the great things about the Internet is the fact that there is a site out there for everyone regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation or political affiliation.

Being a retired person enables me to spend many of my days skulking the Internet from the way farthest reaches of the left to the way farthest reaches of the right and everything in between, reading the partisan nonsense that passes for thought.

I have come to the unhappy conclusion that the political parties that supposedly represent the interests of both the left and the right are rotten at their very core and neither can be trusted with the people’s business.

Further, there is no party that represents the majority of the American people, those that reside in the middle. 

Liberal/Progressive Democrat types are always whining about a lack of “bipartisanship” within our elected governmental bodies. What bipartisanship of course means to your garden variety liberal/progressive type is that the right needs to agree completely with every thought they might have because they are good people and as good people they only want what is good for other people.  And by extrapolation anyone who disagrees with any tenet that a liberal/progressive person might hold to must be a bad person because all liberal/progressives are good people who only want what is good for other people.

Those people who identify themselves, as Conservative Republican’s really don’t care that much about bipartisanship as they are fully convinced that the left is populated by delusional whack jobs lacking even the tiniest clue about what really works.

Each side has been able to maintain at the very least a modicum of political power and maintain their rancorous debate for the better part of a generation.

The result of course has been a decade or more of gridlock on practically any issue you can think of, with one notable exception.

 

     

 

The National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 1540) passed the Republican controlled House of Representatives by a vote of 283 to 136 having passed in the Democrat held Senate by a vote of 86-13 and was subsequently signed into law by Democrat President Barack Obama.

This bill includes a provision that enables the United States Military to arrest and hold without trial for an indefinite period of time any person the government deems to be a terrorist.

Now what you need to appreciate here is that opposition to this provision extends from the furthest reaches of the American left to the furthest reaches of the American right, from the ACLU to the Tea Party Patriots and beyond.

Test this out for yourself.

Ask anyone you know if they think it’s a good idea for the military to be able to arrest and hold indefinitely without trial an American citizen suspected of being a terrorist.

I’ve asked a raft of people, they mostly look at me like I’m an idiot to even suggest such a thing.

Yet Congress which exists to represent the will of the American people passes this bill with way majorities, and the President who ran on a promise of change signed it immediately.

In all my reading and what I find to be most interesting is that I can find no evidence that the American people's interest/concern about terror and terrorists even begins to approach that of our elected representatives.

With the exception of certain elements within the “Christian Right” who are pretty damn sure Islam is out to get 'em and in all fairness do have some evidence to support that notion, most Americans view “Terror” as an issue that pales in comparison to many other issues including jobs, healthcare, entitlements, deficits ..... you name it.

Yet both political parties remain terrorized and continue to sell “Terror” every time they seek to ...

And that is the very question you need to be asking yourself,  "Just what exactly is it, that they are seeking to do?"

 

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