chuckle8: Did you mean:
"They are being heavily fined but NOT enough to keep B of A from continuing the practice"?
Man, if BofA can miss recording that a payment was made...they might even miss recording that one has money in their bank! And that could go for any bank!

I also happen to agree with you about the banks purposely making home loans to those they knew could not afford to stay in their homes. All the psychological framework has been applied against us all by very sly and cunning criminals in the banking industry who has misused our trust, in what we all thought were hallowed institutions, for the purpose of stealing our money...or our future money that we work for. When the rules change and the value of our money is manipulated to be worth less it amounts to a kind of slavery. When you work your whole life with the institution-generated illusion that your 401k or your other pension program is safe and something you will be able to rely on when you retire and then they cheat you out of it later on just before you retire then that amounts to a kind of slavery...you worked for free...you worked for nothing. And then the criminals turn right around and try to blame their victims!

Who among us are experts at everything? Economy, finance, legalese, the law? We all have to rely on experts some time or we have to take the chance that those institutions are legitimate and will not try to screw us. How many people, even now, read and fully understand everything in what they agree to when they sign something or even click on a software end user's license agreement or Confidentiality Agreement? Unless you do, you cannot belittle all those people who trusted the institutions when signing for a mortgage agreement. David Abbot's post, #6, yesterday was very funny and inspiring. Could we really do unto them, the "institutions" what they are doing to us? They would probably try to get us for forging a legal document.

Hell, we can't even trust the US government, our institutions of law. They are all lying to us and spying on us as if we were all their slaves. Slavery is not dead in America but Democracy sure is! It is more like tyranny and our forefathers knew how to handle tyranny...maybe we should think about it!

I knew someone who worked for a financial institution back in 2006-2008...he was a loan officer...and he revealed how his institution was putting pressure on him to sucker people in for loans to people who he knew would soon lose their homes. They were instructed to be "very creative" in making it look like they "qualified". In fact, I remember almost 30 years ago, when I took out a loan for my house that they did some "creative" arithmetic to make me seem more qualified than I was. I thought then that it seemed a bit dishonest but, hey, who was I to know any better than the "experts"? Things worked out for me ok...but lots of other people...especially when buying during a bubble were just suckered in.

Carson L ~ Yes! The previous "contracts" offered by Bush's system worked until the Base loan kicked in. That increase was hidden in the contract but represented actually paying off the loans. The borrowers were fine just paying the interest. The only way to keep someone making $2K -$3K/MO on a $300K loan in their house is to restrict the payments to the interest alone. Simple math. The people will accept it because it is what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. People are funny that way.

Another potential Fukushima waiting to happen in South Korea this time? Big scandal in South Korea over nuclear revelations:

".., a snowballing scandal in South Korea about bribery and faked safety tests for critical plant equipment has highlighted yet another similarity: experts say both countries’ nuclear programs suffer from a culture of collusion that has undermined their safety. Weeks of revelations about the close ties between South Korea’s nuclear power companies, their suppliers and testing companies have led the prime minister to liken the industry to a mafia."

"..investigators discovered that the questionable components are installed in 14 of South Korea’s 23 nuclear power plants. The country has already shuttered three of those reactors temporarily because the questionable parts used there were important, and more closings could follow as investigators wade through more than 120,000 test certificates filed over the past decade to see if more may have been falsified. "

http://cryptome.org/2013-info/08/sk-npp/sk-npp.htm

We are going to have to rename "The Pacific Ocean" to "The Fission Cesspool". Don't eat the fish!!!

Carson L -- You didn't mention the greater evil. The greater evil is banks loaning money to people who could not afford it. Of course, all that evil fades when compared to what B of A employees are revealing. The one I remember the most is B of A not recording a payment and then forclosing on the home because of a missed payment. They are being heavily fined but enought to keep B of A from continuing the practice.

Danne - first off, thank you for helping me comprehend this massive undertaking. Correct me if I'm still off base here, one of the biggest problems with this is people agreeing to loans that they could never afford? So a house loan is actually impossible to ever pay off? It's just constantly more interest payments even after the 15 or 30 years or what not?

Edward Snowden's email service company, Lavabit, has shutdown leaving a very mysterious message of what I believe is a distrust and scorn against the US government for their criminal acts....

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

http://boingboing.net/2013/08/08/lavabit-email-service-snowden.html

@Palindromedary

Great article. Thanks for that link.

Oops, I promised myself I'd steer well clear of Thom Hartmann's bizarre blog. Adios!

Quote Michael Hudson's "Obama's Master Class in Demagogy 101 (re:Obama's speech on July 24, 2013 on the economy)": Like any good politician, President Obama recognized that if he tells people that he knows how squeezed they are, they will assume that he intends to solve the problem he has just described – not make it worth rewarding his backers.

Without mentioning that he had promised to write down the legacy of consumer debt and real estate debt, he hoped to disarm audience resentment by acknowledging that over the past “three decades, a housing bubble, credit cards, and a churning financial sector kept the economy artificially juiced up. But by the time I took office in 2009, the bubble had burst.” So it’s not his fault; he just inherited the problem.

What’s wrong with this picture? He obviously did not expect his students to remember how Democratic Congressman Barney Frank’s got Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to agree to link the $700 billion TARP subsidy to the banks to a mortgage-debt writedown. Paulson agreed to this, if President-elect Obama would sign on. He didn’t, and the proposal sank.

President Obama also did not expect the Knox College liberal arts students to have read FDIC Chairperson Sheila Bair’s Bull by the Horns or SIGTARP Neil Barofsky’s Bailout to remember how Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disabled any serious plan to write down mortgage debts, by explaining to Barofsky that the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP) was intended merely to “foam the runway” to slow foreclosures, not prevent them.

President Obama sought to get the debt problem behind him by acknowledging up front that it had cost “millions of Americans their jobs, their homes, and their savings. The decades-long erosion of middle-class security was laid bare for all to see and feel.” Not mentioned was how this “erosion” of security was what had produced the gains of the banks and Wall Street institutions that became his largest political campaign funders.

http://michael-hudson.com/2013/07/obamas-master-class-in-demagogy-101/

Both Republican and Democratic Presidents have enacted these destructive neoliberal policies, deregulation being one of the tenets of that ideology. For example, the recent financial crisis can be traced directly back to Clinton's policies.

So I don't understand Thom's continuing campaign to set up the Republicans as the bad guys. They are both the same - they are funded by corporate money and advocate corporate friendly laws to the detriment of everyone else. The best example is corporate taxation - both parties shifted the burden of taxation from the rich and corporations to the middle and poorer classes.

"The wealthy indebt them, shift the tax burden onto the less powerful, and turn government into an oligarchy"

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/26855.Michael_Hudson

"This false narrative ignores the fact our greatest growth periods are those in which U.S. individual and corporate tax rates have been highest. The same is true in most countries. What is stifling economic growth is the debt overhead – owed to the 1% – and tax cuts on free lunch wealth."

http://michael-hudson.com/2012/08/wall-streets-war-against-the-cities/

Enough of the Red v Blue scam, Mr Hartmann - are ye naive or complicit. I certainly have had enough of your blogs - no better than MSM brainwashing.

Death is the great equalizer. No one will reside in great mansions after they die except, perhaps, in their imaginations before they die. The poor will also imagine, before they die, that they will get their just rewards in their own imagined kingdom in the sky. Neat way for the wealthy classes to keep the majority of superstitious people from making more demands during their lifetimes. The wealthy know that the masses could, at any moment, overwhelm them and take away everything that they had stolen from the masses to begin with. The key is to keep the masses believing in nonsense...keep them stupid and controlled...and keep them fearful of some contrived outside threat while keeping them ignorant of the real inside threat. Our real enemies are the ones waving the flag the hardest. They are the connivers, the contrivers, the greedy scum bags that use all the psychological tools to enslave us.

Want to super size those fries? Said the spider to the fly! Let us fatten you up so that you are too obese and obtuse to rebel...then we'll gobble you up! And to top it all off we'll frighten you with the prospect of terrorists...don't worry, we'll protect you! We ring Pavlov's bell, and all you lowly dogs salivate with visions of savoring yet another MC Ds Supersized Scat burger or shake with fear at some Muslim Extremists come to blow you up. Boooo! Are ye askeered yet? Hungry, perhaps?

Here, buy yet another GPS or the latest cell phone so we can keep track of where you are at any moment and so we can know what you are saying and thinking. Buy yet another car with all the latest technology (so we can remotely hijack and crash your car into a tree if we deem you a nuisance)...or "move up" to a bigger more expensive house..keep those bubble prices inflating..."never a better time to buy" ..."after all, the prices will never go down"..."get in now before you miss the American Dream".

You just have to have the latest of everything... because "you're special"...."you deserve it"....just "buy now, think later!"...the commercials all tell you so...and you believe them. Your slop-fed elephantine bodies (oink, oink!) hardly fit into those designer garbage products anymore which, of course, warrants your objections to all those skinny commercials...those skinny models. The fact that most men prefer skinnier women clashes with the reality that many of those women are not so skinny anymore.

It's hard for women, and men, to fight against the psychological inducements in commercials to eat more shit burgers and fat fries..so they get fat. The men continue to lust after the skinnier women (and it is probably so that the majority of women lust after skinnier muscular men, as well). Since the manipulators still want to slop the hogs with all that junk food, they are now giving in to the demands of porcine women everywhere to sport them in more commercials as sexy and pleasing to look at. It may work to make the fat buckets happy but I don't think the men will be swayed much. They are still going to lust after skinnier women...even though, they themselves, are also buckets of fat. So the psy-ops mental manipulation machines, commercials, seems to be shifting it's strategy to encompass all the fat people who still have something left on their credit cards.

Don't worry, people, after you fall for all that psychological crap and sacrifice everything you worked for (unless you inherited it..in which case you really did nothing to earn it anyway...did you really "deserve" it to begin with?...just like many wealthy people) you will end up relatively penniless, fat, and are left with a pile of worthless junk you thought was "to die for" once. Again, death is the great equalizer. The wealthy typcoon's rotting remains won't be worth any more than the lowliest peon's rotting remains. The maggots won't care!

Thank you brother Dave! That was much easier for me to digest! I have to admit though, I'm always joking, especially when i'm trying to be serious, believe me, i hate it more than anyone but that's the me I was dealt with, It has lead me to one conclusion that maybe even the extra extraordinary serious talkers might agree with me on, No matter how hard i try, even if I lived a million years, I'll never be as funny as Rush Commercials Linbah-humbug. He just kills me every time. I'm just an entertainer, but lately ive been evolving into an entertainer with a conscious, hopefully i'll continue to evolve into an educated and aware entertainer who can help a good man's word stick to the masses. I have to ask you what you would consider a 'good' republican to be? Or if the very notion contradicts itself making it a mere conceptual anomally never to be actually produced by any limits of any universe? If so, then what do you think the democratic party would split into two over if Republicans deteriorate?