FedUpUSA

(CNN) — Clay Duke sat quietly through the first portion of the Bay District Schools, Florida, school board meeting Tuesday afternoon as local children were honored for their achievements.

When it came time for citizens to bring up issues, the 56-year-old resident calmly approached the front.

He spray painted a red “V” with a circle around it on the wall, brandished a small-caliber handgun and ordered the room cleared at a Panama City schools building.

“Six men stay. Everyone else leave,” the burly gunman said.

And then he started shooting.

Fortunately, he was a bad shot.  The only person killed was himself, when he apparently took his own life (in fairness there is some controversy over this – some people say the police shot him.  Not that it really matters once you open fire.)

It appears, incidentally (if this is the guy), that he was a convicted felon.  Therefore his possession of the gun was unlawful and before someone starts with “we need more gun laws” I will agree - we need a law mandating that all law-abiding citizens own – and keep on their person – a firearm for self-defense!

On his Facebook page there appears the following:

“My Testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster (V)… no… I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves. The 95%… the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do, as they like to us...”

How long will we, the people, allow this to continue folks?

How many people have to snap?

Where is the breaking point for the citizens in the general case?  Not one disturbed man, but the majority of men and women?

The charges he lays above are true.  Just a few of the abuses:

• Making loans that the lender knows can’t be paid.  Predatory?  Yep.  Intended to enslave.
  
  
• Marketing garbage securities as “AAA” when the seller knows, or would have known if they bothered to look, that they were in fact worthless – and in some cases, were designed to fail from the outset as they were bespoke by someone who wanted them to fail.  Predatory?  Yep.  Intended to enrich the creator while destroying the people on the other side, without any disclosure of the intent of the entity who bespoke the transaction.

• Creating property, other asset and in fact tax bubbles that lead municipalities, states and others to make bad decisions predicated on fraudulent claims of “growth”, when in fact all that has happened is that we have borrowed – that is, pulled forward tomorrow’s demand to today.  Predatory?  You bet – plenty of entities skimmed off their piece of it, including government employee unions and government itself.  Illegal?  Probably not, but culpable in what is now occurring, yes.

• Government allowed a man who was involved in the S&L scam as a regulator to remain on the job and he did it again.  He was “removed” from his post, but was he prosecuted?  Nope.  Scams performed by government aren’t illegal, so they appear to say.

• Attempting to steal homes where there is no mortgage at all, and in fact refusing to even examine contrary evidence, forcing the innocent to hire lawyers, spend thousands and sue?  Predatory?  Yep.  Vampiric, in fact. 

• Using every possible tool, legal or not, including but not limited to filing affidavits that are unverified (despite claiming otherwise), extorting FASB into allowing fantasy “marks” for securities, refusing to recognize embedded losses that The Fed assessed at 10 cents on the dollar to the tune of over a hundred and fifty billion in face value by just one bank – hundreds of billions across all of them and more for the explicit purpose of hiding losses and forcing those who were injured by the original bubble to cover the loss that the bubble-blowers would otherwise have to eat, and which would force them into bankruptcy.  In effect these vultures forced and today are continuing to force the victims of a robbery to pay their restitution – that is, causing them to not only be robbed by the brigand but then robbed again by the government!  Predatory?  Oh hell yeah.

For more than three years I have documented and written on the raw abuses of these entities – both corporate and worse, government’s so-called “regulators” that are in fact not only enablers but explicit co-conspirators. 

Remember that Citibank’s former Chief Underwriter testified under oath that 80% of their loan production was defective by 2007 – yet neither The Fed or Federal Banking Regulators at the OCC did a damn thing about it.  Not then, not now, not at all.

If that’s not predation what is?

Not all of the things that happened during the bubble were illegal.  Some was just pie-eyed idiocy.  But some of these acts – and in fact the big enabling acts that blew the bubble and those that were then undertaken to avoid having the truth come into the light of day were against the law.  Filing affidavits where the person attests to knowledge but doesn’t have it is Perjury, and is a crime in Florida (and most other states.)  So is notary fraud.   So is any sort of pyramid scheme, and nowhere in Florida was it more-prevalent than in the “flip this condo” game played in Panama City where this shooting happened, less than an hour east of me. 

In point of fact an associate of mine – a Realtor – tried to get me involved in flipping condos in that very town back in 2004 and 2005, with the usual pitch about how it was easy money and you only had to have 10% of the cost of the unit to do it – and that people were flipping blocks of five, ten, even twenty units at a crack.  I told him it was going to blow up in his face, that his clients were going to lose their life savings, and I refused to get involved.

One of the “signature” projects he was pushing was seized about a year ago by the funding bank – uncompleted.  I don’t think he got his commission checks either, since they were payable at closing – closings that never happened.  Oops.  Worse, not only were the “buyers” putting down only 10% in cash they had to present a letter of credit from their bank for the next 10%, which means people were levered in these things 2:1. 

Yet unlike unregistered securities where one must be an “accredited investor” to buy, these were made available to anyone who cared to gamble – whether they could afford to lose the money or not and whether they had any idea what they were doing.

Our government has refused – utterly refused – to put a boot on any of the frauds.  In fact they have enabled and ratified the frauds!  The banks that created over a trillion dollars in arguably-bogus private-label securities and trillions more in Fannie and Freddie paper, all predicated on intentionally pumped “valuations” that never really existed, were not only bailed out with taxpayer money they were given explicit permission to hide existing losses by Congress when it forced FASB at gunpoint to change the accounting rules. 

Read Tavakoli’s indictment presented to Federal Regulators last week.

Then listen to her interview on CSPAN.

Consider that Treasury is running two sets of books - a crime when done by anyone else.

Three years on folks.

NO PROSECUTIONS, NO ARRESTS, NO INDICTMENTS LEVELED AGAINST ANY OF THE “BIG BANK” ACTORS OR THEIR EXECUTIVES.

NOT ONE.

When the government refuses to enforce the law, when the government becomes complicit in the commission of crimes, eventually the people say “fuck it” and decide that there is nothing left to lose. 

Right about then they lose it and we get results like this.

I said back at the start of 2009:

Our government needs to put a stop to this crap, and do it now, before a significant percentage of the population comes to the conclusion that The Government is the Felon and is actively conspiring with financial fraudsters to rob the citizens.

This pattern is likely to continue, and in fact escalate, until and unless we see actual enforcement of existing laws against those who caused this mess.  That means arrests, it means indictments, it means breaking up the big banks and it means prosecutions of those who not only intentionally blew the housing bubble but who did and continue to cover up the losses that must be taken and the bad debts that must be flushed out before our economy can actually recover.  Today we instead lie to the American people by cranking deficits higher and higher while presenting a false veneer of recovery under which the people of this nation literally are dispossessed of everything they have and then starved on top of it.

There are predictions that I hate being right about.

This is one of them.