FedUpUSA

Archive for April 5th, 2011

How much longer will you stand for these institutions robbing you?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Belvidere, Illinois, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) April 1, 2011 –

The investigation alleges that mortgage lenders such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PHH, Prospect Mortgage, Guaranteed Rate, Home State Bank, Key Financial Services, Platinum Mortgage, Integra Mortgage Inc. and various regional home builders have specific programs in place to compensate real estate brokers for steering business to their mortgage units.

This practice is illegal.

Madigan’s investigators are looking into consistent, widespread and obvious patterns of consumer fraud and manipulation. ??Month after month, these mortgage lenders get a substantial share of the mortgage market due to aggressive and defined kickback programs.

Kickbacks are against both State and Federal law.

It is not uncommon to see materials marketed to real estate agents with clear inducements of steep kickbacks or a split of the mortgage revenues that grossly inflate what consumers should pay for the mortgage or home they are purchasing. ??The Attorney’s office commenced the investigation when they looked into marketing material and a web site created by Integra Mortgage: www.af-usa.com. The promotional material claims that real estate agents can earn a commission by logging onto the web site and registering home loan consumers for mortgages. The mortgage company claims that once the registered loan transaction funds, the real estate broker or other interested taker would be given a portion of the mortgage revenue. When reviewed for accuracy the af-usa.com site noted rates two to three percentage points above fair market rates.

Screw the consumer and don’t disclose it fairly and fully.

Other types of lenders rely on weak State regulatory oversight and legal loopholes to obfuscate revenue kickback schemes. Bank of America, Prospect Mortgage and Wells Fargo appear to be the most egregious at this form of pay-to-play. Common regional examples of tie-in schemes are: First Freedom Financial (Bank of America), a joint venture with Prudential Realty and Personal Mortgage Group/PMG (Wells Fargo), a joint venture with Remax Real Estate. It’s estimated that Bank of America and Wells Fargo by themselves utilize several hundred joint ventures across the U.S.

Nice scheme.  The allegation is that cross-ownership winds up screwing people, because the loan origination winds up being steered by the broker in question, and the tie-in means that the consumer gets hosed through paying higher fees and costs, and those “profits” inure to the benefit of the tied company.

Joint ventures between real estate brokerage firms and banks are structured in many ways and usually work quietly behind the scenes. These ventures are typically negotiated at the upper levels of management between the banks and realty brokerage owners. The mortgage banks often funnel money to joint bank accounts of which the real estate brokerage owners draw off of as desired. ??Companies such as Guaranteed Rate have developed micro revenue kickback schemes for real estate agents specifically wherein the real estate agent can actually own a “share” of the company and is therefore entitled to mortgage company “profits”. Fraud is established from the first transaction because the kickback is not an even proration of Guaranteed Rate’s company revenue but rather based on the scope of the real estate agents referrals.

Wave your hands, scream and shout and then claim not only “too big to fail” but too big to jail as well!  Remember, Wachovia did this with nearly $400 billion in money laundering for Mexican Drug gangs, and our wonderful “press”, including the UK press, ignored the story until the “deferred prosecution agreement” expired, making sure that they’d get away with paying just a tiny fine amounting to less than two tenths of one percent of the amount they moved for these gangsters.

These mortgage bankers clearly understand that kickbacks are against Federal laws yet they continue to cook up elaborate go-arounds to Federal and State statutes. Their hopes are that the regulatory bodies are so ineffective that these kickback schemes will never be discovered.

No, their expectation and reasonable belief is that you won’t do shit about it, and thus these banks literally whizz all over the front hedge of your alleged “office” in which you sit and post wild press releases claiming to be “protecting” consumers.

Consumers have good foundation for this belief. After all, you not only allowed the banks to screw people with subprime lending and failed to assert the State’s 10th Amendment right to stop it, but you then went further and allowed an admitted 150,000 admitted bogus (and likely felonious and perjurous) documents to stand in your state courts and be used to foreclose on homeowners. 

You’ve also allowed apparent wanton and outrageous false claims of ownership of these loans to be made at the time of foreclosure, when there is an incredible amount of evidence that many of these loans were never transferred into the trusts at all.  Since the PSAs and NY Trust Law requires that this be done within (typically) 90 days of the closing date of the trust in question and the default and foreclosure happens months or years later these defects are incurable.  This means that these institutions are standing before your judges and in your courtrooms demanding to evict people for paying a debt that is not owed to the bank in question! 

Literal trillions of dollars worth of paper has been presented as “authentic” to your courtrooms that is in fact not authentic, lacks a documented chain of ownership as required by the PSA and law (because it does not exist) or has been buttressed by fabricated and back-dated paperwork that constitutes a separate and distinct fraud upon your courts.  You have done nothing in the form of prosecuting these institutions for their conduct, even though fraud is typically a felony offense, perjury is typically a felony offense and defilement of the court system destroys the legitimacy of your governments, legal systems, the citizens fundamental liberty interest and the 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law.

The alleged “AG Settlement negotiation” is a bad joke and yet another fraud upon the public, this one being yours.  There is no criminal prosecution, no requirement to admit guilt and no recovery of the funds and properties stolen through these corrupt practices, most-especially fee-cramming and other acts designed to generate bogus defaults (including but not limited to banks telling homeowners to intentionally default so as to “qualify” for modifications they then fail to deliver.)  To add insult to injury your proclaimed “settlement negotiation” permits balloon notes as “modifications” which we know from experience in the 1930s will simply result in the putative “owner” losing his house in the future – after the bank makes even more money through additional interest, fee and penalty charges.

You have, in fact, a documented decades-long record of not giving a damn about the people at all when it comes to these matters, deferring to these large institutions in virtually every case.  In this regard you join Eric “Placeholder” as a gaggle of so-called “Attorneys General” who appear to have as your highest, best and only calling advocacy for and protection of those large financial institutions that screw the consumer.

The Attorney General’s office is making an effort to change that perception.?Illinois and Federal laws prohibit non-mortgage licenses to earn a fee on the origination of residential mortgages. If you have information that may help the Attorney General’s Investigation or you feel that you’ve been taken advantage of please contact the States Attorney’s Office or the IDFPR at the offices below.

Attorney Genrals Chicago Main Office
100 West Randolph Street
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814-3000

IDFPR: Professional Regulation
320 W. Washington
Springfield, IL 62786
Phone: (217) 785-0800

I will not believe a word of your claims until I see banksters locked up in prison for not only this alleged kickback scheme, but also for the admitted violations of the law that have already taken place.

The Market-Ticker

The US government lies.  Sure looks like most Americans gobble up false and misleading information that is nothing less than political propaganda.  Take the highly hyped unemployment number for March, 2011 of 8.8 percent that moved like a tornado through the media and was praised by Democrat politicians and the White House.  As if that number is accurate, as if it fairly describes unemployment.  It does not.  What is called by experts, such as Leo Hindery, as the real unemployment number was actually 17.7 percent, which is remarkably higher.  To appreciate that much higher number is to throw a large bucket of cold water on all the political spin on the economic recovery.

The official government unemployment figure has been carefully crafted to intentionally underestimate actual unemployment.  The way the data are collected through a survey of homes intentionally ignores a number of unemployed and underemployed Americans.  The latter includes those who have stopped looking for a job because it has become crystal clear to them that there are no jobs for them, as well as those working part-time when what they really want is a good full time job.

Similarly, Gallup polling which takes into account these other factors found the total number for March up slightly to 20.3 percent of the US workforce.

As if this sham game is not bad enough, what the government also does not reveal with hard information is that most new jobs being created now are low wage ones often without any good benefits.  Another reason to see how delusional the economic recovery is.

To get back to a low unemployment level characteristic of a good economy could take up to ten years.  The federal lie includes 13.5 million unemployed workers but the real number is more like 28.2 million.  That means a lot more hardship and suffering in the fictional recovery than the government wants the public to know about.  The number of real unemployed workers has increased by 11.5 million since the start of the Great Recession, and just since December 2008 by 3.7 million.

The economy must add 13 million private sector jobs over the next three years-360,000 each month-to bring unemployment down to 6 percent.  There is no possible or imaginable way for this to happen.  So real unemployment will remain terrible.

All this plus the fact that real wages have stagnated for many years means that the middle class in the US is in dire shape.  The most important implication of this is that there is no good reason to think that the deeply depressed housing market stands any chance of recovery for many years.  There are not enough people with enough money and financial security to buy even low priced houses.  There simply are too many empty houses and even more coming from millions more foreclosures.  Without a healthy housing market it is inconceivable that a true economic recovery and meaningful growth are possible. 

In other words, contrary to all the blabber from politicians and pundits, the current recovery is largely delusional as far as the vast majority of Americans are concerned.  Of course, the rich Upper Class is doing just fine.  In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth.  The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively hold just 12.8 percent.  As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Odds are that you, dear reader, are in the bottom 80 percent, which means you should have the good sense to see how delusional the current economic recovery is and that you should have little hope for doing well in the future.  Remember also that state and local governments facing budget shortfalls will surely layoff many more people and those congressional attempts to address the horrendous national debt and deficit will surely mean cuts in many government programs that many in the bottom 80 percent depend on.

Companies will continue to make huge profits, pay little in taxes and continue to manipulate government policies through lobbying and campaign contributions so that they keep getting away with murder of the middle class.  Corporate bigwigs and Wall Street fat cats will continue to grab incredible amounts of money.  And hardly any of the corporate crooks that have screwed most of us will get prosecuted or jailed, as they should.  Nor will there be any true, badly needed reforms of the financial sector.  Banks will continue to financially rape Americans.

Lies will keep coming from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress as well as President Obama.  Do you want to believe them?  Or can you accept the painful truth about our bleak national condition and stop voting for lying politicians that keep the corporate dictatorship in power?

 Joel S. Hirschhorn Delusional Democracy