FedUpUSA

I know, I know, some of you in law enforcement probably hate me plenty.  After all, I’ve run a number of pictures and videos of you committing acts that were I to do the same thing you’d haul my ass off in irons.

You should be in jail for those acts, and that’s a fact.

But before you go off and commit another felony, er, “fire another rubber bullet at a cameraman“, I want you to step back for just a minute and ponder this.

Then I want you to fact-check it, because I’m right and I’m offering to save your (financial) ass and I don’t even want anything from you for the favor.

You’ve been robbed just like the rest of the 99%.

Specifically: Your pensions are not going to be paid.

Got that?  They’re NOT going to be paid.

Why am I sure of this?  Because they can’t be paid.  It is mathematically impossible for you to get the money and health care you were promised.  You were lied to by the very people who now “order” you to go shoot rubber bullets at peaceful people wielding….. cameras.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen in blue: You are getting screwed too, and you probably don’t realize it at this point.

But you will.

State and local governments have less than one-fifth of the funds to maintain the infrastructure that exists today.

They not only lied to you, they’ve lied to everyone else in our communities as well.

About a year and a half ago at a “Tea Party” event we had some political speakers trying to stump up votes for themselves.  They were running for county commission – the people who make the decisions for the local area.  You probably know your county commissioners by name.

I stuck my hand up at one point and asked “When am I going to own my house?”

There was an awkward silence; the candidate didn’t understand the question.  He thought I was talking about having trouble paying my mortgage, of course.

I wasn’t: I was talking about the fact that if I stop paying property tax at any point I get evicted by the county.  In effect I do not own my house; I rent it from the county.

The consternation was considerable, but this is the point you see: The usual means of financing things like the road you drive your cop car on is through a bond issue that has a maturity longer than the road will last, and what’s worse is that the only revenue raised during that time pays just the interest!

Then the road needs repaved, and… we float another bond, with the first one still outstanding.

I know, you folks in the PD think I’m kidding.  The local folks would never screw you like that, right?  After all, you keep the community “safe”.

You’re wrong.  They not only would, they already have.  A local example from my area will make this clear.  Our local School Board asked for a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for roof and refrigerator replacements in the schools.  Sounds ordinary, right?

Well, it’s not.  See, The Board had already taken the money they should have put aside for this and blown it on other things.  How do we know this?  Because roofs and refrigerators have known design lives — you know this from your own house!  Your refer wears out and so does your roof.  So you should be saving 1/20th (or whatever) of the cost of a new roof or refer every year; this way in the 20th year you have the money to pay for the replacement.

Instead of doing that the School Board blew the money on something else — with these known costs and exposures in the future — then cried poor mouth when the inevitable happened.

Isolated incident?  No.  Look at the Mid-Bay Bridge here in Niceville.  Or if you wish the Garcon Point Bridge over near Pensacola.  Same situation; the latter already has effectively defaulted, the former inevitably will, as it too cannot cover the bond issues in principal and interest off the bridge tolls.  There’s no rational projection of traffic levels that will allow it to do so and yet in the former case they’re still spending more money they don’t have extending the bridge access road!

The same is true of your pensions.

You’re not going to get them unless you’re scheduled to retire in the next couple of years.  Down the road this is a certainty, because these pension funds are assuming 8% or so net returns.  That’s idiotic; the stock market has made a grand total of nothing over the last decade, yet at an 8% return it should have increased in value by 115%!

You’re going to get stiffed.

I guarantee it.

Some of you will retort “but we’re guaranteed that money by our state constitution!”  My answer is simple: There is no way that taxes can rise to a sufficient degree to pay for these promises.  It’s simply not possible for the people to pay that much in tax, and thus they won’t.

So why are you working for people who are financially raping you?  They’re lying — you’re not going to get paid what you were promised as it is mathematically impossible just as those bond issues will never get paid off as they’re effectively “interest only” loans that are for a longer duration than the alleged “improvement” will last!  The entire scheme on the bonds works so long as they can be “rolled” at maturity.  When they can’t — and eventually the lenders will refuse to stack more debt upon bad debt — the entire game comes apart.

Our entire economy at the Federal, State and Local government levels is a gigantic series of Ponzi schemes in this regard.  Medicare is the worst of all; between it and Social Security they have a forward liability of close to $100 trillion dollars, or more than six times the size of the entire economy.  If you have allegiance to The Constitution and Rule of Law you should be arresting the politicians and banksters, not the people.

If your allegiance is simply to your own self-interest you should walk off the job, because no police or firefighters union can make money appear that doesn’t exist, and your promised funds do not exist.

I don’t expect you to believe me.  Go pull the numbers on your favorite bond-financed “street improvement” project or similar item in your area.  Get the design life of that improvement and figure out the tax money that will fund payment of the debt.  I’m willing to bet that if you randomly pick on ten projects of this sort that the vast majority of them have incomplete and many will have no coverage of the principal, which means the debt will never go away — it will get ever-larger until it inevitably consumes all funding, making the payment of your promised benefits impossible.

Do your own diligence, ask your own questions.  Demand answers in facts and figures, not “oh you’ll get your money.”  Make them prove it — and if they can’t (trust me — you’ll find that they can’t) you might want to consider exactly what you’re doing out there every day with that rubber-round-stuffed shotgun.

You’re making an effort toward your own family’s financial destruction!

If you won’t listen to me, listen to Roger Waters…..

Then cross the lines or, if you just can’t….. simply walk off.

OWS Demonstrator Run Over Speaks Out

ABC Video

Hoh hoh hoh what’s this?

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, saying that years of unscrupulous lending still haunts the state, is creating a 25-person task force to target mortgage fraud of any size — from small operations that preyed on troubled borrowers to corporations that sold risky loans as safe investments.

Aha.  Now we’re seeing something useful.  Gee Kamala, why did it take this long?  And can I ask whether you’ve figured out how to get around the pesky statute of limitations problems?

• Corporate fraud, including instances in which bundled mortgages were sold as securities to the state or its pension funds under false pretenses. Harris said her office plans to prosecute some cases under California’s False Claims Act, which she described as “one of those very powerful tools that California uniquely has … to pursue, in essence, what are false claims that are submitted to the state.”

It’s called “control fraud” Kamala.  Go ask Bill Black about it; he wrote the book.  Literally.  And he was entitled to, seeing as he prosecuted and jailed something like 1,000 banksters last time around during the S&L mess.

• Scams, including instances in which consultants, lawyers and others took fees from people in foreclosure, saying they would help the homeowners get loan modifications or other remedies, but delivered nothing.

That’s a target-rich environment. 

• Fraudulent lending practices, including deceptive marketing, failure to fully disclose loan terms and qualifying people for loans who couldn’t afford the terms.

You mean the wonderful models that were designed for one and only one purpose: To force serial refinancing so as to generate fee income, all propelled on the back of two presumptions:

• House prices would rise forever, and therefore the bank could simply steal the appreciation by constructing a loan that would effectively guarantee your reappearance in their office in two or three years.

• If the first didn’t happen, the bank didn’t care as they had sold off the bad loan to someone else, claiming it was a good loan.  We know this factually happened because Citibank’s former Chief Risk Officer testified under oath before the FCIC that 80% of their loans written in 2007 did not meet quality standards.  Yet they sold them onward anyway.

She goes on with:

“We are looking at a situation of up to $640 billion in wealth having been lost because of this wave of foreclosures that has hit the state,” Harris said, referring to the decline in homeowner equity.

It’s not quite that simple.  See, the so-called “equity” was never really there is in the first place.  You can’t lose what you never had, or to put it another way, the fraud caused the “equity increase”; discovery of it, and the deflating of the bubble simply removed that which was falsely claimed to have occurred.

But that’s wordsmithing.

Many Wall Street financial institutions — private equity firms, hedge funds and banks — bundled often poor-quality mortgage loans into securities during the boom years and sold them to major investors, including pension funds. That resulted in billions of dollars in losses when borrowers defaulted on the loans, triggering the financial crisis.

There’s nothing wrong with making dangerous loans and selling them.  It only becomes illegal when you lie about what’s in the box.  If you tell someone that the box is full of used dog food, that’s legal. 

But what would anyone pay for a box of used dog food, as opposed to one full of premium chocolates?

Ah, there’s the problem you see.

Presented properly to a jury, given the under oath statements already made, it shouldn’t be that tough.

It’s not about inability to prove the case – it’s about political will to go after institutions that have formed some of the biggest campaign funding sources over the last decade.

The announcement is good, but as always the proof is in the follow-through.

The Market-Ticker