This July 4th It Is Time To Reaffirm Our Independence; Independence From Corporate Rule And A Failed Government.
      Let’s Buy Our Government Back From Special Interests – Estimated Cost: $14 Billion By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds Here’s a thought: let’s buy our Congress back from the special interests who now own it. We all know special interests own the U.S. Congress and the Federal machinery of governance (i.e. regulatory capture). How much would it cost the American citizenry to buy back their Congress? The goal in buying our Congress back from the banking cartel et al. would not be to compete with the special interests for congressional favors — it would be to elect a Congress which would eradicate their power and influence altogether. A tall order, perhaps, but certainly not impossible, if we’re willing to spend the money to not just match special interest contributions to campaigns but steamroll them. A seat in the U.S. Senate is a pricey little lever of power, so we better be ready to spend $50 million per seat. Seats in smaller states will be less, but seats in the big states will cost more, but this is a pretty good average. That’s $5 billion to buy the Senate. A seat in the House of Representatives is a lot cheaper to buy: $10 million is still considered a lot of money in this playground of power. But the special interests — you know the usual suspects, the banks, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Tobacco, the military-industrial complex, Big Ag, public unions, the educrat complex, trial lawyers, foreign governments, and so on — will fight tooth and nail to maintain their control of the Federal machinery, so we better double that to $20 million per seat. Let’s see, $20 million times 435…. That’s $8.7 billion to buy the House of Representatives. It seems we’re stuck with the corporate toadies on the Supreme Court, but the President could scotch the people’s plans to regain control of their government, so we better buy the office of the President, too. It seems Obama’s purchase price was about $100 million, but the special interests will be desperate to have “their man or woman” with the veto power, so we better triple this to $300 million. Add these up and it looks like we could buy back our government for the paltry sum of $14 billion. This is roughly .0037% of the Federal budget of $3.8 trillion, i.e. one-third of one percent. That is incredible leverage: $1 in campaign bribes controls $300 in annual spending — and a global empire. Once we bought back our government, what would be the first items on the agenda? The first item would be to eradicate private bribes, a.k.a. private campaign contributions and lobbying. If you allow $1 in campaign contributions, then you also allow $10 million. There is no way to finesse bribery, so it has to be cut and dried: no member of Congress can accept any gift or contribution of any nature, monetary or otherwise, and all campaigns will be publicly financed. Is this system perfect? Of course not. There is no perfect system. But the point here is that a system which allows even a $1 private contribution to a campaign cannot be restricted; after the courts have their say, then all attempted limitations prove worthless. So it’s really all or nothing: either we put our government up for auction to the highest bribe, or we ban all gifts and private campaign financing and go with public financing of all elections in the nation. That is the only practical and sane solution. Any proposal that seeks to finesse bribery will fail, just like all previous attempts at campaign finance reform. Any member of Congress who accepts a gift, trinket, meal, cash in an envelope, etc. will lose their seat upon conviction of accepting the gift. Once again, you can’t finesse bribery. It has to be all or nothing, and the only way to control bribery is to ban it outright. As for lobbying, thanks to a Supreme Court dominated by corporate toadies, it will be difficult to ban lobbying outright. However, that doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t try to force the toadies on the Supreme Court to make a distinction between a corporation with $100 billion in assets and billions to spend on bribes and a penniless citizen. (Those two are not coincidental; in a nation run by and for corporations, the citizens all end up penniless unless they own or manage said corporations, or work for a Federal fiefdom which can stripmine the nation at will.) Congress should pass a law banning paid-for lobbying. If a citizen wants to go to Congress and advocate a position, they are free to do so–but they can’t accept money to do so. If they receive any compensation from any agency, enterprise, foreign government, other citizen, you name it, from any source, then they will be sentenced to 10 years of fulltime community service in Washington D.C., picking up trash, etc. If the Supreme Court toadies strike down that law, then here’s another approach: Require all paid lobbyists to wear clown suits during their paid hours of work. In addition, all lobbyists are required to wear three placards, each with text of at least two inches in height. The first placard lists their total annual compensation as a lobbyist. The second lists the special interest they work for. The third lists the total amount of money that special interest spent the previous year on lobbying, regulatory capture, bribes to politicos and political parties, etc. Every piece of paper issued by lobbyists must be stamped in large red letters, “This lobbying paid for by (special interest)”, and every video, Powerpoint presentation, etc. must also be stamped with the same message on every frame. The second item on the agenda is a one-page tax form. The form looks like the current 1040 form except it stops at line 22: TOTAL INCOME. A progressive flat tax is then calculated from that line. Once again, you cannot finesse bribery or exemptions, exclusions, loopholes and exceptions. Once you allow exemptions, exclusions, loopholes and exceptions, then you’ve opened Pandora’s Box of gaming the system, and the financial Elites will soon plow holes in the tax code large enough to drive trucks through while John Q. Citizen will be paying full pop, just like now. The entire charade of punishing and rewarding certain behaviors to pursue some policy has to end. Any deduction, such as interest on mortgages, ends up creating perverse incentives which can and will be gamed. It’s really that simple: you cannot finesse bribery or exemptions, exclusions and loopholes, because these are two sides of the same coin. The tremendous inequality in income, wealth, power and opportunity which is distorting and destroying our nation all flow from the inequalities enabled by bribery and tax avoidance. The only way to fix the nation is to eliminate bribery (campaign contributions and lobbying) entirely, and eliminate tax avoidance entirely by eliminating all deductions, exemptions, loopholes, etc. State total income from all sources everywhere on the planet, calculate tax, done. When you think about how tiny $14 billion is compared to the $3.8 trillion Federal budget and the $14.5 trillion U.S. economy, it makes you want to weep; how cheaply we have sold our government, and how much we suffer under the whip of those who bought it for a pittance. Fraudclosure Watch: Firefighter to Demolish Home Before Bank of America Forecloses After Deceptive SchemeEntire Cobb Mtn. Estate to be demolished by couple with dueling dozers rather than allow Bank of America to auction it off in the fraudulent foreclosure Ponzi scheme, bogus modification scam now sweeping our nation! An estimated 15 Million homes/families’ lives hang in the balance! We’re all in this together – How are you fighting back? This was originally posted and flagged down within an hour the first time I posted two nights ago on Craigslist under: real estate and in just 18 minutes the second time I posted it under: free stuff. Please leave this up as it a serious commentary about the very real, current state of our nation! Hello readers, we are Ana & Robert Somerton from Cobb, CA. We recently received from Bank of America a “NOTICE OF INTENT TO ACCELERATE” and “Options to Avoid Foreclosure”. We’ve been advised by our legal representative that we’re out of legal options/remedies to Bank of America selling at auction our beautiful hand built home of 15 years. Won’t go into great depth or detail here, suffice to say we’ve been run through the Bank of America Hope/Harp/Hamp wringer and hung out to dry. If you’ve been through this, you already know what it means, if not, do us all a favor and educate yourself before responding to this, thanks. So unless some kind sole comes up with the 24k we are now behind on our mortgage payments, we will most certainly, within the next few months lose our home to the Banksters of America. We have decided that when/if it comes to that we’ll offer our home (BofA once appraised at $350k, Zillow now shows at $133k!) and anything, anyone cares to remove from it, including some very nice expensive Pella doors/windows, kitchen and bath fixtures, appliances and all it’s contents to anyone who can use them. We’ve also decided that rather than allow BofA the satisfaction of selling/taking our home intact, once everything of value is stripped from it, with DUELING DOZERS my wife an I will take it down to the concrete slab my father built it on back in the early 1990s. Leaving nothing but a smoldering pile of debris in the driveway for BofA to attempt to sell, like an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition with no plan to rebuild! Wish us luck, once it’s done look for the full demolition video under the heading “CA homeowners respond to fraudulent Bank of America foreclosure with Dueling Dozers”. We plan on shooting it from at least three fixed angles with additional cams mounted inside each DOZER for full effect. Any media outlets interested in an interview prior to and/or covering the day of the demolition can contact us directly. Ana & Robert Somerton 707-245-7541 Anyone who’d like to drive-by, meet the owners, view the home/contents prior to the demolition, our address is: 11784 Gifford Springs Rd. Cobb, CA 95426 This is not a short sale, as we’ll not do Bank of America that favor, also we have no interest in a Deed in Lieu or the few thousand dollars they’d like to give us for the keys to the only home we’ve ever known/owned! We are extremely hostile to any “BofA tools” trespassing on our property as long as we still own it, violators will be dealt with accordingly! As a result of fraudulent actions by the “Too Big to Fail” banks, 28% of US homeowners now owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth. A new survey by Fannie Mae found that 27% of American homeowners are considering walking away from their mortgage. Why should we be forced to pay an overvalued mortgage when it was the big banks who wrecked the housing market? After getting bailed out with trillions of our tax dollars, the big banks are reaping record profits and their executives are giving ... As I sit here on this 4th of July weekend to write this article and reflect on what is happening in this once great nation, it saddens me that it has gotten this bad… If you really take a step back and evaluate where all this madness has taken us, it can really hit you hard… How did we let things go so far? We, as a nation, as the people of this nation, need to take back what has been stolen from us. Again, what is happening here was no accident. It was the biggest ponzi scheme ever perpetrated i... The most powerful Wall Street banks are used to getting their own way, especially with politicians, but New York’s attorney general is trying to turn the tables on them. Eric Schneiderman is digging into the accumulating evidence of massive fraud and false documentation revealed by the foreclosure mess and asks a potentially explosive question: How bad is it? The answer could prove devastating for some of the largest financial institutions in the land, confronting them with huge new losses and maybe r... Eight mortgages long fraudclosed and two mortgages long past short sale, from Palm Beach County, Florida all in CWALT 2006- OC8 and all show ACTIVE in the MERS system. Countrywide - Bank of America - Bank of New York Mellon - BAC Home Loans What entity or entities are claiming these phantom assets on their books? CWALT 2006 - OC8 " Tags: foreclosures Economic Death Squad Imagine coming back to your home after being away a few weeks and finding the locks changed and the home trashed. That's what happened to Chris Boudreau of Brooksville. Boudreau showed us the home, which was stripped bare. Walking through the living room, he tells us "I used to have a couch, a sofa, a couple of end tables, a TV, DVD player, tapes and cabinet... but they are now gone."" Tags: foreclosures Economic Death Squad ... He’s not going for it. In the strongest comments from a Democrat to date about the state AG settlement with top banks over foreclosure fraud, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman vowed to oppose the deal, striking a near-fatal blow to the effort. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman expects to lead opposition to what he called a “quick, cheap settlement” of a 50-state investigation into foreclosure practices. Schneiderman put the monetary settlement being discussed with the largest... Home prices decreased in the year ended April by the most in 17 months, showing the housing market remains an obstacle for the U.S. recovery. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities fell 4 percent from April 2010, the biggest drop since November 2009. A backlog of foreclosures and falling sales raise the risk that prices will decline further, discouraging builders from taking on new projects. The drop in property values and a jobless rate are holding back consumer sentiment and spen... Four years into the foreclosure crisis, banks say they've made major improvements in how they handle struggling homeowners. They've promised, for example, not to foreclose on homeowners who are being considered for mortgage modifications. But that's still happening. Consider the cases of Laurie Pinkerton and Lisa Peterson. The two women, both Californians and Bank of America customers, had been assured by the bank that they wouldn't lose their homes before they'd been evaluated for a possible modific... In October 2007, CNBC's Diana Olick called me about Countrywide's so-called plan to modify mortgage loans scheduled to reset to higher rates. Subprime borrowers with a strong payment history would be able to refinance and possibly get prime FHA loans. Current paying borrowers with credit issues would be offered Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loans under a new expanded program. Mortgage Loans with Less than Zero Value Mortgage modification programs, including HAMP, were abysmal failures. At the time I tol... The details are thin but they sure don’t smell right. The short form is that Sunny Sheu had his house stolen from him by fictive buyers who used forged documents. Judge Golia of Queens engaged in what appears to be highly questionable behavior in failing to reverse the sale. Sheu started investigating the judge, was told by policeman who specifically referred to information he had provided about Golia, and that if he didn’t drop it, he’d wind up dead. Sheu disregarded their warning and did wind up dea... Neither Congress nor the Obama administration have shown much initiative to fix the nation's deepening foreclosure problem of late, but the issue remains a dominant subject of activist attention and a major source of middle class anxiety. That's the takeaway from a packed Friday panel on bank regulation and foreclosures at the annual Netroots Nation conference, an annual meeting of internet-savvy progressives. "It is a continuation of the insane Wall Street behavior of the 2000s," said financial blo... A Tucson mayoral candidate from a fringe political party has seized dozens of foreclosed homes in metro Phoenix, changing the locks, kicking out real-estate agents and posting "Do Not Trespass" signs. Independent Rights Political Party Trust is claiming to own the houses. "Lenders are gangsters, and they can't prove they own these homes. So they have no right to foreclose," said the 80-year-old self-professed billionaire from his real-estate and political office in Tucson on Tuesday. "I plan to contin... If common sense, instead of banks, ruled the nation, a solution to the foreclosure crisis would have been found long ago. That point was driven home over and over during a public hearing on a measure to stop the foreclosure "madness." Speakers pressed for adoption of the Homeowner Protection and Neighborhood Preservation Act. It would demand an independent audit of foreclosure sales to determine if fraudulent practices were used by banks and mortgage servicers, have the sheriff implement a moratorium ... Mathis, a mother of three from Indiana, wrote to the president that even though she graduated at the top of her college class and worked for years as a surgical technologist, she had lost her job in January after complications with her pregnancy. "I am so afraid this dreaded economy is going to have my family homeless," she wrote. Mathis is now weeks away from being evicted from her home. A Michigan woman sold a letter from Obama for $7k to help pay for her cancer treatment. She was struggling to make... Banks taking over foreclosed properties are considered the new homeowners, but what happens when the building is home to dozens of families who rent? That should make the banks the landlords too -- at least temporarily. The reality, though, is that banks tend to prey on people who don’t understand their rights and immediately evict the innocent tenants, even though displacing families blights entire communities and vacant buildings often become a safety issue. In a report (PDF) issued last week by the... Should you keep paying your mortgage on a home that's dwindling in value? No way, say an increasing number of underwater homeowners who are voluntarily choosing to "walk away" from their home loans, a practice known as "strategic default." Jon Maddux, CEO of YouWalkAway.com, reports 10% more clients this year to his company, which advises people how best to handle the walk away process. Fannie Mae found that about 27% of homeowners would consider walking away, that's up from 15% last year. ... A report from Fannie Mae found 27% of homeowners would consider walking away. The previous year only 15% would think of defaulting on a mortgage they could still afford. Morgan Stanley estimated 200,000 strategic defaults in 2009 or 12% of the total. (Please see the full story at “Walk away from your mortgage? Time to get ‘ruthless’ – CNN Money.) Most walk-away borrowers are good credit risks with high FICO scores. One Florida couple paid $1.4 million for a house which is now worth $400,000. They ar... Following yesterday's news out of Zillow of a 0.77% drop in April home values compared to March, today we get an update from CoreLogic which in turn looks at the latest trends on "underwater" (or negative equity) mortgages in the US. In summary: "10.9 million, or 22.7 percent, of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity at the end of the first quarter of 2011, down slightly from 11.1 million, or 23.1 percent, in the fourth quarter. An additional 2.4 million borrowers had less... The nation's largest mortgage companies are operating on the assumption that they will have to pay as much as $20 billion to resolve claims of widespread foreclosure abuse, an amount four times what they had originally proposed. Associate US Attorney General Tom Perrelli told a bipartisan group of state attorneys general that he believes the banks have accepted the realization that a wide-ranging settlement to the months-long probes will cost them much more than the $5 billion offer they floated last ... Unemployment is higher in places with greater declines in residential construction. Nevada and Florida lead the way with more than 80% declines in residential construction and unemployment over 12%. Until the housing market recovers, unemployment will stay high in these states. Economist Bill McBride notes, however, that cause and effect run both ways: " A higher unemployment rate probably means less residential construction, and less construction would mean a higher unemployment rate."" ... Join Move to Amend this 4th of July as we Declare Our Independence from Corporate Rule in communities across the nation! We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to: * Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. * Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our vote and participation count. * Protect... This year, as the nation celebrates Independence Day, the sputtering U.S. economy offers a stark reminder that today we're more dependent upon foreigners than ever before. We need them to finance our debt; China and Japan together hold more than $2 trillion of U.S. Treasury bonds. We need them to supply much of the oil that's critical to our economy. We need them to make the shoes we wear and the gadgets that dominate our lives. We even need them to buy more of the products we make, as growing export... After this week, workers laid off through no fault of their own will not be eligible for any of the extended unemployment benefits layoff victims have received from the federal government since 2008. States typically provide the first 26 weeks of unemployment insurance and Congress has provided extensions during every recession since the 1950s. But the current extensions are set to expire at the beginning of January. "There's a real potential cliff coming for unemployed people," emailed Judy Conti, a ... A subgroup of the Anonymous hacker group has launched two WikiLeaks-type Web sites where insiders and other hackers can expose sensitive information from governments and corporations. The LocalLeaks.tk site is for information related to corruption and wrongdoing at a local level, while the HackerLeaks.tk site is for any other stolen data. The HackerLeaks site, which launched on June 25, got its first submission on Tuesday--a list of personal details of Orlando, Fla., officials--though the data was p... The most powerful Wall Street banks are used to getting their own way, especially with politicians, but New York’s attorney general is trying to turn the tables on them. Eric Schneiderman is digging into the accumulating evidence of massive fraud and false documentation revealed by the foreclosure mess and asks a potentially explosive question: How bad is it? The answer could prove devastating for some of the largest financial institutions in the land, confronting them with huge new losses and maybe r... Oakland Institute just completed the most thorough investigative report on who's buying land in Africa: "Hedge Funds Grabbing Land in Africa." As commodities prices rise and inflation picks up, the OI made the report public. What OI has discovered is a small number of investors paying sometimes nothing for large plots of land in some African countries. The lease deals are arranged between seemingly corrupt African leaders, reportedly without disclosing the details to the members of the communities tha... To understand why a raging wildfire near the Los Alamos National Laboratory is a big deal, you must understand how wastes were disposed. Approximately 18 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes onsite were disposed of since 1943. “All of the radioactive waste and most of the chemical waste have been buried on the mesas of Pajarito Plateau where LANL is located. Radioactive liquid wastes were discharged to the canyons, initially with little treatment.” For many years, one method of... Democracy Now: More than 750,000 British public sector workers staged a 24-hour strike Thursday in a stand-off with the government’s plans to reform public sector pensions. The reforms come as the government tries to trim its deficit and would require public workers to work longer, pay more toward their pension and receive less upon retirement. Meanwhile in Greece, thousands of workers staged a 48-hour strike and many took to the streets after the Greek Parliament approved a raft of austerity measures... So this is what “fragile and reversible” progress looks like in Afghanistan: violence is up 51 percent since this time last year, thanks to a hurricane of insurgent suicide attacks, assassinations and bombs, undermining U.S. military claims that it’s breaking the momentum of the Taliban. The closest thing the war has to a report card comes in the form of a new quarterly report from the United Nations. And the American troop surge appears to be dangerously close to flunking. According to the U.N., not ... Just 100 days after a deadly earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, concerns are being raised about several U.S. nuclear stations that are facing natural disasters of their own. Rising floodwaters from the Missouri River are threatening to damage Nebraska's Fort Calhoun Station and Iowa's Cooper Nuclear Station, while a raging forest fire is advancing towards the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The Los Alamos lab has been shut down since M... Irzen Octa had, according to Bloomberg, racked up a $12,000 debt, interest included, with the large bank. Mr. Octa traveled to Citi's local offices where, police allege, he was brutally beaten by debt collectors. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the local hospital. The practice of hiring debt collectors to intimidate clients is a common practice, according to Jim Castle of the American Chamber of Commerce. “It’s not just Citibank,” Castle says. “Every banker I have talked to who has a credit card ... Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. The absence of any... Last week’s lawsuit was the third time since 2006 that the SEC accused the same subsidiary, J.P. Morgan Securities, of the same kind of fraud violation. What’s galling is how typical this is. Back in 2006, the securities arms of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Wachovia Corp. were co-defendants with JPMorgan in the same auction-rate- securities case. They, too, were issued cease-and-desist orders barring the same type of future violations as JPMorgan. Both Goldman and Wachovia were accused later by ... It's more accurate to take the Pentagon's basic budget and double it because as much as 40% of it is hidden. For FY 2012, the House approved $690.1 billion, an 8.4% increase. If the entire [previous budget of] $1,027.5 trillion increases by the same amount, it raises known FY 2012 defense-related spending to $1,114 trillion. With supplemental and hidden add-ons, as well as Pentagon, intelligence, and other amounts, the grand total likely exceeds $1.5 trillion, a figure rising most years while popular ... The wars that flowed from 9/11 will not only have been the longest in US history. At $4 trillion and counting, their combined cost is approaching that of the Second World War, put at some $4.1 trillion in today's prices by the Congressional Budget Office. Unlike most of America's previous conflicts moreover, Iraq and Afghanistan have been financed almost entirely by borrowed money that sooner or later must be repaid. What America achieved by such outlays is also more than questionable. Two brutal regi... The Federal Reserve delivered the punchline to the year-long joke that has been the lobbying blitz over debit card swipe fees. Amid heavy Wall Street pressure, the Fed nearly doubled the amount it will allow banks to charge retailers and consumers under a new regulation while effectively exempting an entire class of debit card transactions from the rule altogether. The swipe fee debate dominated the Senate for months, as nearly the entire U.S. retail industry battled banks in Capitol Hill backrooms. L... More than 200 Texan counties have been designated drought disasters by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and all remaining counties now qualify for federal aid. KCBD reports that 213 counties have lost at least 30 percent of their pasture or crops to wildfires and drought. "This is a disaster. This is a train wreck. We've never seen anything like this before. People are scared, they don't know what to do and what's going to happen to them next. It is a true calamity. The impact is heartbreaking. We’v... If Facebook's new facial recognition software isn't scary enough, imagine Mark Zuckerberg's face replacing George Washington's on the dollar bill. On July 1st Facebook is making a declaration about its new virtual currency, "Facebook Credits," that could well put the Internet powerhouse on the road to dominance of all online commercial transactions, well beyond just the $2 billion market of virtual goods it already monopolizes. Until Friday any credit card or PayPal would do to buy games and virtual g...      |
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