To help celebrate May Day and Cinco DeMayo, the NY Times published a piece in their weekend Magazine section entitled “The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy” by Adam Davidson
In it, Edward Conrad, formerly of Bain Capital and one of Mitt Romney’s friends and larger contributors explain the true purpose of wealth matriculating into the hands of the 1%, or in his case, the .01%. In brief, here is Edward Conrad’s thesis.
Greed is good. Continue Reading »
I’ve been waiting six months to finish telling this story. Finally, I can.
I recently opened a business which required banking presence all across the US. In searching for a suitable banking establishment to handle my banking requirements I settled on B of A.
I can hear people gasping now. How can you, of all people, use B of A as your bank? Well, I had to … at least until I came across quite the acceptable substitute, a local bank which has made a dedicated effort to create a strong internet banking presence. For those that are interested, Mountain West Bank can do some rather sophisticated things for you on a national level and someone like B of A or Chase or one of the bad guys no longer have the monopoly on a national presence.
That’s not the story though. The story is about how I was walking to my local B of A branch to open said account. Suddenly, I thought of my friend PW’s story about $4.10 reprinted below. Digging into my pockets son of gun what do you suppose I find? Four one dollar bills and a dime. It took $25 to open the account so I transferred money from another account to open my B of A account and then made a ceremonial deposit of $4.10.
Last week, I proudly closed the account w/ B of A. I withdrew all of the money except for $4.10. I then asked the clerk to close the account and give me my $4.10 back.
I can’t promise you the same level of chaos as my friend PW did on account of $4.10, but it is in his loving memory I went through this silly little exercise.
To you, PW. May this $4.10 create as much havoc as yours did. I can only hope. Continue Reading »
Not too long ago, there was a lot of hullaballoo over the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had arranged for the purchase of several hundred million forty caliber hollow point rounds. Then I read in the Voice of the Whitehouse that littered throughout the United States are these caches of several hundred thousand rounds Teflon coated shells designed to slip past kevlar body armor. They called them cop killer bullets, remember them? Seems somebody is making provisions for a shootin’ war.
Why give yourself over to those sorts of plans? It seems to me, we are better off choosing our own battlefield rather than let those guys choose it for us. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese General known for his iconic “Art of War”, says: Continue Reading »
Yesterday, the Sunday of the 2012 Martin Luther King Holiday, this article crossed my desk:
Northwest Trustee Services Squeezes More Profits From Home Foreclosures with One-stop Model
It seems Northwest Trustee Services and their “sister” lawfirm Routh Crabtree Olsen (RCO for those in the know – perhaps our own little David Stern, our own little mill?), was singing about how happy they are because they are bullish on the destruction of hearth and home throughout their little empire of the Inter-mountain West, Alaska and Hawaii. In it, Stephen Routh, exclaims “There’s misery coming” and then spends the rest of the article bragging about how he intends to make $erious hay from bringing it to a community near you. You can almost hear his hands rubbing with glee as he counts the money he will make from providing ALL the services a foreclosing party might wish to utilize from substitute trustee services, to law firm services, process service, rental and property management to the main thrust of the story, how he is buying up small community newspapers so he can pocket the money currently being spent in newspaper advertisements. Can’t leave a trick on the table, doncha know? It seems there is money in Mi$ery. Continue Reading »
Recently, an article appeared in the Advocate, a magazine circulated to Idaho attorneys which supposedly addresses the legal concepts applicable in Idaho relating to fraudulent foreclosures. The author is described as specializing in complex financial transactions, and it is clear, her paycheck comes from representing banks.
Overall, the article is a puff piece designed to suggest that banking attorneys are correct in all of the tactics they use to attempt to defeat fraudulent foreclosure actions, and it references a case pending before the Idaho Supreme Court, Trotter v. BONY. It repeatedly uses the inflammatory mantra that homeowners who resist foreclosure just want a “free house.” To date invocation of this horridly prejudicial phrase has served the banks well around the country, even though in most cases, the attorneys for the banks have absolutely no idea what the homeowner’s true intent is
Welcome to Portia’s blog.
In Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” it was Portia, who was not a lawyer, who used her brilliant legal mind to spare her “client” from producing his pound of flesh to Shylock, the evil creditor. She is the perfect role model. There are thousands of brilliant attorneys who deserve a place to post their work in an anonymous venue. Portia’s blog is here to provide that avenue. Post away, your public is waiting.
NOT FOR ANYONE I CARE ABOUT
by Portia
How the banks are out to use the OCC to hide their crimes against homeowners
The hottest new buzz in the land of foreclosure fraud comes from a new program administered by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Federal Reserve (the Fed), all described as “federal regulators” on the site set up to advertise the program.
http://www.independentforeclosurereview.com/
This program is a supposed “free” opportunity for homeowners who were the victims of illegal foreclosures to be “compensated” for their economic loss. The site lists 16 banks/lenders who are participating in the program.
http://independentforeclosurereview.com/faq.aspx#FAQ4
The program is not available to everyone victimized by the banks’ fraudulent actions, and there is no promise that any compensation will be granted, nor how it is computed, and the “reviewers” are mostly multinational accounting firms like Deloitte, Touche, who have long been in bed with the major banking institutions. Apparently, no lawyers are involved, and there is no indication that anyone with legal training is involved (of course behind the scenes one can only imagine what kind of legal advice these lending institutions are being given in order to cut their losses on the backs of homeowners, once again). Continue Reading »
I sat in on a phone call today between a highly trained attorney and three different $10 an hour employees of RUST Consulting in Minneapolis MN. We wanted to get some information on this new and improved government cheese program called the OCC’s Independent Foreclosure Review. It was quite the laugh as I listened to the attorney pretend he was a distressed, angry, and at times tearful and fearful homeowner. Here is what we found out.
This is a game show. They won’t say that, but to these jaded eyes what we are looking at is no different than talent scouts scouring the countryside looking for contestants for the new season of “American DreamZ, DreamZ with a Z” and what a snoozer it is. It’s your opportunity for more voluntary auto-humiliation at the hands of the very ones who have been tormenting you up to this point. It wouldn’t surprise me to see this as a new reality TV show where the audience can vote on the amount of award to the contestants. Can’t you just see the contestants (homeowners) jumping up and down clapping their hands hysterically as they get their piece of the Government Cheese? Continue Reading »
Delaware AG Beau Biden recently filed a rather large complaint against MERS which did a pretty good job of showing most of their crimes. Delaware Online gave Bill Beckman, the new (and improved) CEO of MERS an opportunity to respond. Below is his response as printed by Delaware Online with my point by point rebuttal. (I’ll try not to laugh too hard – btw, anyone besides me think this guy looks like Barney Fife?) My comments are in red.
Beau Biden is wrong on MERS lawsuit
By Bill Beckman
The MERS System has been an efficient way to register the majority of home mortgage loans in America for more than a decade. The press and politicians paid little attention because the MERS System works. It works for lenders and for homeowners.
No facts here, just comment based upon a reading of history. The reason no one paid any attention to it is because everyone was making boatloads of money. Why upset the machine when it fed the elite financiers and politicians so well? The majority of home loans means over 65MM homeowners affected by this curse, this blight upon the land. It worked GREAT for lenders. Just what it did for homeowners is totally unclear. I mean, it screwed them royally, but just what the upside is remains totally unclear.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Those iconic words from Charles Dickens in 1859 opened “A Tale of Two Cities”. It is there where we meet Madame DeFarge and experience her knitting. Madame DeFarge is the wife of Monsieur DeFarge, the Wine Shop keeper who is also a leader in the underground just prior to the French Revolution. His wife’s knitting keeps the record of the grievances of the common people against their “betters”. When the terrible retribution comes, it is her knitting which calls forth the guilt. Continue Reading »
Because if I didn’t I would be blind with outrage. I tried the outrage. It takes a lot of negative energy which made me negative and I knew if I didn’t change, it would consume me. Like so many things I have learned in going down the rabbit hole, too often, you have to look at the issue from a different perspective in order to see the picture. If you learn to do that, what looks like chaos suddenly becomes clear. Who says how I have to look at it? Laughter or outrage? The choice is mine.
When you change your perspective on this part, suddenly a lot of things become funny. I was on the phone w/ this guy as he sat in the back of his Peterbuilt driving the road for casino shows. He had just lost his house and his family at the courthouse steps and the Cash for Keys lady, a woman of eastern descent supposedly representing JP Morgan was banging on the door speaking nearly incomprehensible heavily accented English to his soon to be ex wife while handing over documents demanding all involved parties sign immediately.
One of the documents which the woman handed over, scanned and sent to me, was the form the courthouse crier filled out when the house went back to beneficiary. Who was the beneficiary?
“The Bank” Continue Reading »