Whistleblower, Szymoniak Has It Going On!

Banks, Mortgage Companies Defrauded HUD, Veteran Whistleblower Says

FEB 5, 2014 1:30pm ET
 

A whistleblower with a track record of wresting large settlements from banks is suing 22 companies for allegedly filing fraudulent mortgage documents with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Lynn E. Szymoniak, famous for her 2011 “60 Minutes” interview on the robo-signing scandal, filed a lawsuit late Monday against the companies, including Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. The Palm Beach, Fla., plaintiff’s lawyer alleges the 22 banks, mortgage servicers, trustees, custodians and default management companies created fraudulent mortgage assignments and submitted tens of thousands of false claims to HUD.

The lawsuit is a stark reminder that banks still face massive litigation and potential settlements for wrongdoing from the mortgage boom and financial crisis. On Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it violated the False Claims Act and agreed to pay $614 million to settle claimsthat it improperly approved Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Affairs loans that did not meet underwriting standards.

HUD oversees the FHA, which reimburses servicers for losses and fees when government-guaranteed loans go into foreclosure.

Banks can be held liable for treble damages under the False Claims Act if they are found to have “falsely certified” that mortgages met all FHA requirements. The act also gives whistleblowers the right to file suit on behalf of the government.

“It’s been very difficult to uncover how fraudulent documents were created and spread through the system,” says Reuben Guttman, Szymoniak’s attorney at the firm of Grant & Eisenhofer. “Lynn Szymoniak did the original analysis, looked at documents and put the pieces together in a way that nobody else did.”

The new lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina. Several of the defendants, including Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo, said they are reviewing the lawsuit and could not immediately comment.

In 2012, Szymoniak helped the government recover $95 million from the top five mortgage servicers, as part of the $25 billion national mortgage settlement. She personally received $18 million for providing information on the filing of false claims on FHA loans.

The suit also seeks to recover damages and penalties on behalf of the federal government, 16 states, the District of Columbia and the cities of Chicago and New York for the financial harm incurred in the purchase of private-label mortgage-backed securities that allegedly used fraudulent documents in foreclosure filings since 2008.

As investors in mortgage bonds, the government and others paid fees and expenses for services such as reviewing all mortgage documents put into trusts that were supposed to be performed by trustees. The federal government bought mortgage-backed securities with missing or forged documents through several avenues, including the Federal Reserve’s direct purchases and Maiden Lane vehicles, and the Treasury Department’s purchases through public-private partnership investment funds, the suit states.

The complaint does not specify damages but Szymoniak says she expects them to total around $10 billion.

The fraudulent mortgage documents were created because the original loans documents either were never delivered to the securitization trusts, or they were lost or destroyed, the lawsuit states. Many of the documents were created years after the trusts’ closing dates and showed the trusts acquired the loans only after they were in default.

Servicers “devised and operated a scheme to replace the missing documents,” the lawsuit states, and to conceal the fact that the trusts and servicers never actually held the mortgage notes and assignments, which are needed to initiate a foreclosure.

Szymoniak was also instrumental in uncovering fraud and forged documents at DocX, a now-defunct subsidiary of Lender Processing Services. She worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigations and U.S. Attorney’s office in Jacksonville, Fla., that ultimately led to the conviction of an LPS executive, the closure of DocX, firm, and varioussettlements by LPS, which is now owned by Black Knight Financial Services.

 

Cop Who Beat Wheelchair-Bound Drunk In Detox Facility Cleared

Before long, the cops are going to let all this go to their heads. They shoot dogs for wagging their tails and being friendly; they tazer and beat mentally disabled homeless men to death; they beat wheelchair bound citizens…what is next, beating little old ladies to death? This must be stopped. The cops cannot get it into their heads that they are immune when they murder and maime people. I saw a video not long ago, where the female cop was harrassing a man outside of a restaurant during the middle of the day, he called her a bitch and she shot him point blank in the chest.

johngalt's avatarYouViewed/Editorial

Cop Found “Not Guilty” After Beating Man In Wheelchair

” Officer Jouppi has been found “not guilty” of all charges in connection to a video showing him attack a citizen in a wheelchair. The 50-yr-old citizen, Anthony Jackson, was rolled into a detoxification facility by police. A staff member at the facility can be heard instructing Anthony that he was to surrender his jacket.

  Being unable to walk normally, Anthony sarcastically asked, “Do you want me to throw it at you?” That’s when officer Jouppi can be seen grabbing his arm and twisting it back. Immediately Anthony said “Hey you can’t do that” and weakly swatted up at the officer to defend himself.

  That’s when officer Jouppi began pounding in his face. Anthony’s head can be seen snapping back after officer Jouppi punched him the first time. But that wasn’t enough. Jouppi followed with a combination of punches…

View original post 79 more words

MGIC Paid Off 2,400 Loans last month! Why Does the Borrower Still Need to Pay the Same Creditor?

Manifest Injustice!

Unknown's avatarLivinglies's Weblog

Among the many insurance companies that paid off loans or assets based on loans, MGIC. Off 2400 loans a month of January alone, which appears to be virtually all residential mortgages. Press the reason that nobody is paying any attention to this is that normally the insurer acquires the claim through a legal process called subrogation. In the world of securitization the insurer waives subrogation. So we are left with a payment to a creditor. The creditor is identified as the lender for purposes of the insurance. There is no doubt in any venue that once a settlement is accepted by a creditor or claimant the case is over.

But in mortgage foreclosures in appears as though even the most basic and common sense knowledge is ignored. The creditor receives full payment and then allows an agent to foreclose on the property even though the account receivable not longer exists…

View original post 572 more words

Oh Good, Another Winter Storm in Georgia!

Georgia

http://www.wunderground.com/news/winter-storm-pax-latest-news-20140210

Gov. Nathan Deal has declared a state of emergency for 45 counties in north Georgia that are expected to receive the biggest impacts from Pax.

With memories of thousands of vehicles gridlocked for hours on icy metro Atlanta highways fresh in their minds, emergency officials and elected leaders in north Georgia are preparing for Winter Storm Pax. Gov. Nathan Deal, who was criticized for his response to the Jan. 28 storm that paralyzed the metro area and left motorists stranded in vehicles overnight, said in a news release Sunday that he’s put emergency response agencies on alert and began significant preparations. The governor scheduled a news conference for noon Monday to discuss winter storm preparations. The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather watch from 7 p.m. Monday through 7 p.m. Tuesday and a winter storm watch from Tuesday evening through Thursday morning for the metro Atlanta area.

Even before the first snowflakes fell, people around Atlanta were planning to work from home and stay off the roads. Jay Ali, 33, a college student, said Monday morning that he planned to mostly stay indoors. He had little confidence that government officials would handle this storm any better than the last.

“New levels of incompetence,” Ali said, describing the state and regional response to the last storm that left motorists stranded in their cars for hours, sometimes overnight. “Unforeseen levels of incompetence.”

Ali said part of the problem is that Southern cities do not have as many snow plows, sanders and spreaders as Northern cities.

“I don’t think they have the infrastructure to protect themselves if a storm gets really bad,” he said.

GA Power on ice: “It’s an event we’re extremely fearful of but are taking precautions for” #Pax #ATLwx #GAwx

— Shawn Reynolds (@WCL_Shawn) February 10, 2014

Today February 3, 2014 Enews:

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Fuk-Us-Hima the Royal Screwing by Japan

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE FUCKING COFFEE SHEEPLE!!!

ENENEWS

Nuclear Engineer: “Very huge catastrophe” for melted fuel to burn into ground — Radioactive material “will go all around the world” once in underground water — Chernobyl made cement barrier below reactor, #Fukushima did not (VIDEO)

Published: February 1st, 2014 at 11:46 am ET

By ENENews

http://enenews.com/nuclear-engineer-very-huge-catastrophe-if-melted-fuel-burned-into-ground-radioactive-material-will-go-all-around-the-world-once-in-underground-water-chernobyl-made-cement-barrier-below

Global Green USA: The Future of Nuclear Energy, Chernobyl and Fukushima:

At 2:00 in Natalia Manzurova, nuclear engineer called to Chernobyl for 4+ years to study radiation’s effect on the environment and to help cleanup workers:

To cover the burning reactor core, they started dropping bags of sand and cement into the reactor and all this stuff — due to very high temperature — melted, and covered the burning reactor as a lid. And for 24 hours the whole world was on the edge of a very huge catastrophe because from above the reactor was covered, was closed, but it was going to burn down. If the reactor burned through the ground, then all this huge radioactivity will go to underground water, and it will go all around the world.

In Fukushima, now they are cooling the upper part of the reactor, but the center of the reactor has been melted down, and this melted reactor will discharge huge temperature to the bottom of the reactor. If the tragedy that the melted reactors will go through the bottom to the underground, it’s the question.

Russian miners, in order for this not to happen, they had to drill tunnels. Sacrificing their own lives, they put cement into the tunnels on the bottom of the reactor, so the reactor will be closed from beneath.

———–

People think of the Japanese as being technologically much more advanced than much of the world.  What did they do @ Fukushima?  Absolutely nothing.  TEPCO has murdered us all, and instead of being made to answer for their crimes, they changed their name, and off to business as usual, literally walking away from the continuous radiation leaks, further murdering the rest of the world.  Why the hell does no one care?  Are we the equivalent of the walking zombies of tv shows?

 

EnergyNews

http://enenews.com/

http://enenews.com/wsj-strontium-90-moving-deeper-into-groundwater-levels-rising-asahi-radioactive-materials-spreading-below-underground-wall-next-to-ocean-now-record-high-detected-on-other-side-of-final-barrie

Wall St. Journal: ‘Potentially lethal’ Strontium-90 moving deeper into groundwater at Fukushima, levels rising — Asahi: Radioactive material spreading below underground wall next to ocean — Record high on other side of final barrier by Unit 3

Published: January 31st, 2014 at 9:46 pm ET

By ENENews

Detailed Analysis Results in the Port of Fukushima Daiichi NPS, around Discharge Channel and Bank Protection, Jan.30, 2014:

“The highest dose among the results previously announced in the ‘Detailed Analysis Results in the Port of Fukushima Daiichi NPS, around Discharge Channel and Bank Protection’”

Wall St. Journal, Jan. 31, 2014: Among the radioactive materials that were dispersed at the site, the potentially lethal alkaline earth metal [strontium] poses the biggest immediate concern, because, unlike cesium, it doesn’t get trapped in soil and tends to accumulate in bones of fish and animals if ingested. […] strontium has been slowly moving to deeper into ground water, which could be moving toward the ocean. […] Radiation levels in groundwater sampled from several monitoring wells have been very slowly rising since last summer and radioactive strontium has been detected since October, according to data from Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 31, 2014: A team of reporters from The Asahi Shimbun visited the site on Jan. 29. […] Another problem exists underneath the embankment on the eastern side of the plant site. Radioactive materials have been found to be spreading under that embankment. […]

See also: Expert: “Can’t be changed & can’t be stopped”; Radioactive Fukushima water will continually enter ocean — Significant ‘discreet leaks’ recently — West Coast “should be alarmed” at lack of testing—Levels rising for 2 years & expected to increase

 

http://enenews.com/physician-its-predicted-that-in-fact-it-may-concentrate-as-much-on-the-west-coast-as-anywhere-in-fukushima-as-it-keeps-coming-wave-after-wave-video

Physician: “It’s predicted that in fact [radioactive particles] may concentrate as much on the West Coast as anywhere in Fukushima as it keeps coming wave after wave” (VIDEO)

Published: January 29th, 2014 at 2:35 pm ET

By ENENews

City Channel 4, Published Jan. 21, 2014 (at 35:45):

Audience Question: I recently received a YouTube depicting radioactive contamination across the Pacific near to the U.S. West Coast as a result of the Fukushima reactor. No other news source appears to have acknowledged this scenario least of all the mainstream media. Is that fact or fiction.

Dr. Maureen McCue, founding member, faculty, and former director of the University of Iowa Global Health Studies Program and adjunct clinical professor in the Colleges of Public Health: I think it’s it fact that the mainstream media has not covered the phenomenon. I think we also experience regulatory capture in this country. I don’t know and I don’t think any of us know how much of the contamination is approaching the West Coast. It makes sense, when you look at ocean currents and wind streams, and the movement of marine life, that it will eventually reach the West Coast. In what concentrations, what amounts, nobody actually knows. It’s predicted that in fact it may concentrate as much on the West Coast as anywhere in Fukushima as it keeps coming wave after wave.

 

 

Asahi: Radiation levels spike to record high in Fukushima groundwater well nearby ocean — Trench failures to blame, says Tepco — Million times more strontium/beta-ray source than cesium

Published: December 14th, 2013 at 10:03 am ET  By ENENews

http://enenews.com/asahi-radiation-levels-spike-to-record-high-at-fukushima-plant-well-near-ocean-failed-trenches-to-blame-says-tepco-million-times-more-strontiumbeta-ray-source-than-cesium

Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 14, 2013: Record radiation levels detected in well at Fukushima nuke plant […] 1.8 million becquerels of [strontium and other] beta-ray sources per liter of water were detected at a monitoring well […] in an area close to the sea near the No. 2 reactor building on Dec. 12. The well is located close to trenches holding highly radioactive water. TEPCO said the reading apparently spiked after highly radioactive water seeped into the surroundings through failed parts of the trenches.

Groundwater from well No. 1-16 (pg. 3), Collected Dec. 12, 2013:

Cs-137: 1.8 becquerels per liter (Bq/L)

Co-60: 0.55 Bq/L

All β: 1,800,000 Bq/L

 

 

NHK: More damage being discovered in Fukushima Reactor No. 1 — “Destruction” at containment vessel — Concerned about tons of water draining from unknown cracks and holes (VIDEO)

http://enenews.com/nhk-more-damage-being-discovered-in-unit-1-destruction-at-containment-vessel-concerned-about-unknown-cracks-and-holes-video

Published: January 31st, 2014 at 4:52 pm ET

By ENENews

NHK, Jan. 31, 2014: TEPCO to look for more leaks at Fukushima reactor — The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is slowly finding out more about the damage at one of the reactor containment vessels. The destruction was caused by 2011 accident. […] The engineers are investigating leaks in a number of places in the containment vessel that houses the core at the No.1 reactor [and] estimate that up to 3.3 tons of water per hour is leaking from the 2 leaks. The operator is pouring 4.5 tons of cooling water an hour into the reactor. This means more than one ton of water may be leaking from unknown holes or cracks, as the water does not stay in the containment vessel.

NHK Newsline, Jan. 31, 2014: [Tepco is] discovering more damage at the reactor containment vessel. It says it’s going to take steps to avoid further contamination in  the area […] The engineers have also learned that more than one ton of water [per hour] is leaking form elsewhere. They plan to send in a robot again to search for other possible problems. They say they will expand their search to include the suppression chamber linked to the containment vessel. […]

  

Study: North America’s West Coast to be most contaminated by Fukushima cesium of all regions in Pacific in 10 years — “An order-of-magnitude higher” than waters off Japan (MAPS)

http://enenews.com/study-n-americas-west-coast-to-be-most-contaminated-by-fukushima-cesium-of-all-regions-in-pacific-in-10-years-an-order-of-magnitude-higher-than-waters-off-japan-maps

Published: July 15th, 2012 at 12:59 am ET

By ENENews

Title: Model simulations on the long-term dispersal of 137Cs released into the Pacific Ocean off Fukushima

Source: IOPscience

Author: Erik Behrens, Franziska U Schwarzkopf, Joke F Lübbecke and Claus W Böning

Date: July 9, 2012

Emphasis Added

In the following years, the tracer cloud continuously expands laterally, with maximum concentrations in its central part heading east. While the northern portion is gradually invading the Bering Sea, the main tracer patch reaches the coastal waters of North America after 5–6 years, with maximum relative concentrations ( > 1 × 10−4) covering a broad swath of the eastern North Pacific between Vancouver Island and Baja California. Simultaneously some fraction of the southern rim of the tracer cloud becomes entrained in the North Equatorial Current (NEC), resulting in a westward extending wedge around 20°N that skirts the northern shores of the Hawaiian Archipelago. After 10 years the concentrations become nearly homogeneous over the whole Pacific, with higher values in the east, extending along the North American coast with a maximum (~1 × 10−4) off Baja California. The southern portion of the tracer cloud is carried westward by the NEC across the subtropical Pacific, leading to increasing concentrations in the Kuroshio regime again.[…]

Region I = Western Pacific

With caution given to the various idealizations (unknown actual oceanic state during release, unknown release area, no biological effects included, see section 3.4), the following conclusions may be drawn. (i) Dilution due to swift horizontal and vertical dispersion in the vicinity of the energetic Kuroshio regime leads to a rapid decrease of radioactivity levels during the first 2 years, with a decline of near-surface peak concentrations to values around 10 Bq m−3 (based on a total input of 10 PBq). The strong lateral dispersion, related to the vigorous eddy fields in the mid-latitude western Pacific, appears significantly under-estimated in the non-eddying (0.5°) model version. (ii) The subsequent pace of dilution is strongly reduced, owing to the eastward advection of the main tracer cloud towards the much less energetic areas of the central and eastern North Pacific. (iii) The magnitude of additional peak radioactivity should drop to values comparable to the pre-Fukushima levels after 6–9 years (i.e. total peak concentrations would then have declined below twice pre-Fukushima levels). (iv) By then the tracer cloud will span almost the entire North Pacific, with peak concentrations off the North American coast an order-of-magnitude higher than in the western Pacific.

 http://enenews.com/nuclear-engineer-very-huge-catastrophe-if-melted-fuel-burned-into-ground-radioactive-material-will-go-all-around-the-world-once-in-underground-water-chernobyl-made-cement-barrier-below

 

 

01/26/2014:

Japan (Fukushima)

US/Canada

World

02:58 PM EST on January 25th, 2014 | 107 comments

‘Historical Weirdness’: Expert says US gov’t has failed public by not testing Pacific for radiation — A ‘very obvious’ need since Fukushima is leaking into ocean — They told me “it’s salty” and that’s not our thing (VIDEO)

 

Reports: White ‘goo’ everywhere in Alaska seal, crows won’t touch it… yet they eat people’s roofs — Slime in ones mouth, kidney almost black — Another appeared to change color — Hairless one seen recently: “We all still have sick seals here!” (PHOTOS)

 

http://enenews.com/historical-weirdness

 

« Jiji: Highly radioactive groundwater now flowing under Unit 1 — Levels skyrocket since last test, now 1,000s of times higher — 8 locations hit record in recent days at Fukushima Daiichi    Asahi: ‘Underground holes’ may be needed to search for Fukushima’s 3 molten cores — Did fuel ‘escape’ via basement? — Experts unsure if Tepco will allow them to search for corium »

‘Historical Weirdness’: Expert says US gov’t has failed public by not testing Pacific for radiation — A ‘very obvious’ need since Fukushima is leaking into ocean — They told me “it’s salty” and that’s not our thing (VIDEO)

Published: January 25th, 2014 at 2:58 pm ET

 

MIT Center for International Studies — Japan’s Continuing Nuclear Nightmare, Oct 24, 2013:

Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (at 1:30:00 in): Talking about some of the failures […] what I’ve discovered on the academic side, is that when we went to offer our service, we wanted to go and help out, we didn’t have an agency in this country that really had an interest. NOAA was given the authority to look at this disaster and see what the US response should be. Their reaction was to continue this modeling effort to try and model where these things might be at. Not to do the on-the-ground field efforts. They said we don’t do that, we don’t measure radionuclides. Then they’d point across the aisle to the Department of Energy […] the ocean, that’s not their thing, it’s salty — that’s not their problem. Here we have in our country many reactors on oceans and don’t have even an authority or body that has a mission that includes fate of those radionuclides in the ocean. I think that’s a failure that we still haven’t solved […] It’s very obvious when you hear the stories about leaking tanks on land getting into the ocean, there’s a connection there. But we failed to fill that in, our ability to understand the consequences. […] One example of something we’re still trying to plug up as a failure.

‘Your Call’ hosted by Rose Aguilar, KALW, Jan. 16, 2014:

Ken Buesseler, senior scientist in marine chemistry & geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (At 5:30 in): Historical weirdness going on — NOAA doesn’t study radionuclides per se at all in their programs, so they were looking at some of the debris and their predictions, but not the radioactive contaminants. That typically falls to the Department of Energy, but they tend to only focus their resources and expertise on land and groundwater […] not the general spread of radionuclides in the marine environment. So, we kind of fell between the cracks […] no one was responsible.

 Published: January 26th, 2014 at 9:46 am ET

By ENENews

http://enenews.com/reports-white-goo-everywhere-inside-alaska-seal-crows-wont-even-touch-it-and-they-eat-peoples-roofs-slime-in-anothers-mouth-kidney-almost-black-one-appeared-to-have-changed-c

 

Local Environmental Observers (LEO) Network, Oct. 24, 2013: Hairless seal near Shishmaref — Shishmaref Alaska. October 19, 2013 (seals, subsistence) My friend and her husband shot a spotted seal at the mouth of Serpentine River on Saturday Oct. 19th as they were pulling it in the boat they notice it was a hairless seal, she didn’t have anything to take a picture with. Just to let you know we all still have sick seals here! […]

 

Local Environmental Observers (LEO) Network, Updated Oct. 8, 2013: Sick spotted seal — Eek, Alaska, April 12, 2013 (marine mammal) […] hunter reported that he had caught a spotted seal that he thought was sick. He then proceeded to gut the marine animal and found there was white puss or goo like substance along the muscle tissue everywhere.  […] a very small bit of the fat was chewed on and nothing else. We have crows, they are known to eat just about anything, even silicone off the roof… this animal is not being touched. […]

 

Local Environmental Observers (LEO) Network, May 29, 2012: Unusual bearded seal harvested — Shishmaref, May 29, 2012 (sea mammal) One of our local hunters, hunting about 14 miles west of Shishmaref, reports shooting a regular Bearded Seal […] The first thing the hunter visually noticed was a clear slime within the mouth […] upon butchering there was hardly any fat, and further butchering, the liver was described as small than normal, approximately 1/2 the size of a normal liver for that size. The next thing they noticed was the one side kidney was approximately twice as big as the other, and that the bigger kidney had the appearance of darker color, and also most black. […]

Local Environmental Observers (LEO) Network, May 19, 2012: Discolored seal with sores on side flipper — Shishmaref, May 19, 2012 11:30 PM, (sea animal) This ringed seal […] seems to [have] a BB size lump on one of the forearms, and showing evidence of sores on one side flipper. Hopefully this seal will bring us closer to understanding what may be causing the illness and disease that our marine mammals are being affected by. According to researchers, this is only the second seal that is discolored, the other came from Russia, colored orange. […]

 Nikita Ovsyanikov, Russian Academy of Sciences, March 2012: Almost all diseased seals found on Wrangel Island beaches were only partially consumed by polar bears. [It] is very different from how they eat normal carcasses […]

 

09:36 PM EST on January 25th, 2014 | 49 comments

Jiji: Highly radioactive groundwater now flowing under Unit 1 — Levels skyrocket since last test, now 1,000s of times higher — 8 locations hit record in recent days at Fukushima Daiichi

 02:58 PM EST on January 25th, 2014 | 89 comments

‘Historical Weirdness’: Expert says US gov’t has failed public by not testing Pacific for radiation — A ‘very obvious’ need since Fukushima is leaking into ocean — They told me “it’s salty” and that’s not our thing (VIDEO)

 

01:27 PM EST on January 25th, 2014 | 47 comments

Asahi: ‘Underground holes’ may be needed to search for Fukushima’s 3 molten cores — Did fuel ‘escape’ via basement? — Experts unsure if Tepco will allow them to search for corium

 

10:40 AM EST on January 25th, 2014 | 195 comments

Scientists present links between unusual Alaska seal deaths and Fukushima fallout — Skin lesions, hair loss, lethargy — ‘Pulsed release’ when built-up radionuclides were set free as ice melted — “Wildlife health implications” due to radiation exposure discussed (PHOTOS & MAP)

 

01:05 AM EST on January 25th, 2014 | 75 comments

TV: At height of Fukushima emergency, region in California where plume hit had NO monitors — Email shows EPA ‘decided’ not to deploy RADNET to area — Only one left broke as radioactivity began spiking — “No clue” about exposure levels (MAP)

  

08:55 PM EST on January 24th, 2014 | 171 comments

Expert: “Can’t be changed & can’t be stopped”; Radioactive Fukushima water will continually enter ocean — Significant ‘discreet leaks’ recently — West Coast “should be alarmed” at lack of testing—Levels rising for 2 years & expected to increase

 

05:00 PM EST on January 24th, 2014 | 114 comments

Senior Scientist at MIT Event: Japanese scientists censored — Not allowed to publish research that compared Fukushima to Chernobyl — Fukushima ‘arguably’ bigger

 

02:15 PM EST on January 24th, 2014 | 94 comments

Newspaper ignores scientific models that show Fukushima radiation impacting West Coast — Fails to inform readers by only reporting on discredited tsunami wave-height map — “What illness of the mind must people have to lie about the threat?” (ACTUAL FORECAST MODELS)

 

12:39 PM EST on January 24th, 2014 | 100 comments

Navy Officers on TV: “My body is falling apart” after Japan rescue mission, his right side “just didn’t work” — Another “can no longer use his legs” and unable to urinate — If 300 times normal radiation is OK, I don’t know what to tell you

 

12:59 AM EST on January 24th, 2014 | 201 comments

Nuclear Engineer: Footage shows me “it’s broken… there’s really no containment” at Fukushima Reactor 3 — I expect many different kinds of leaks will be found — Radioactive contaminants “basically floating freely” (AUDIO)

 

09:54 PM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 93 comments

“Shock & Outrage”: Japan TV host reveals being told he cannot discuss nuclear power until pivotal Tokyo election ends — “Somebody needs to bring these issues into the media” — #2 in trending news

 

05:31 PM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 151 comments

AFP: Fears that molten fuel went into ground after melting through containment vessels at Fukushima — They still can’t find three reactor cores (AUDIO)

 

 

02:36 PM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 44 comments

Alaska Marine Expert: We really need to look at what’s happening to ecosystem from Fukushima radiation — Models don’t address ongoing releases at plant — “A lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainties” — Ships are sampling for everything but radionuclides — Could be affecting animals (AUDIO)

 

12:19 PM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 109 comments

Alaska refuses to test radiation levels in fish, says banana is riskier…”and who doesn’t love bananas?” — Officials: It’s forecast to hit U.S. right about now; People are concerned; We absolutely need cautious monitoring

 

10:30 AM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 47 comments

U.S. Military: Baby wipes, tape were main weapons for battling Fukushima contamination — Soldiers didn’t wear protective gear because “we don’t want to alarm public”

 

08:32 AM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 93 comments

‘Significant’ amount of radioactive seawater to hit Southern California? Expected on beaches in near future — Fukushima contamination may be ‘pervasive’ across food chain (AUDIO)

 

01:08 AM EST on January 23rd, 2014 | 96 comments

Wall St. Journal (Japan): ‘US physicians claim radiation risks due to Fukushima nuclear accident’ — ‘Uncertainty’ over quality of radiation data from officials

 

11:12 PM EST on January 22nd, 2014 | 53 comments

Kyodo News: Fukushima raises concerns over “viability of Japan’s future” — Former Prime Minister: Reactor restarts “a criminal act toward future generations”; “Fate of country” at stake; “Myth that nuclear power clean and safe has collapsed”

 

09:45 PM EST on January 22nd, 2014 | 52 comments

Highest Yet: Radiation level hits new record in Fukushima groundwater well — Over 3,000,000 Bq/liter of strontium and beta emitters

 

06:48 PM EST on January 22nd, 2014 | 123 comments

Nuclear Expert: Fukushima “very critical for entire humankind”; “Japan won’t let any foreign experts visit… they are behaving rather strangely” — Nuclear Scientist: Radioactive emissions still taking place all the time; Pouring contamination in ocean may cause “elimination of fish resources”

 

05:41 PM EST on January 22nd, 2014 | 29 comments

TV: Problems with killer whales local to West Coast — Only baby born in 2013 died — Just two born in 2012 — Depleted fish supply blamed

 

06:59 PM EST on January 21st, 2014 | 170 comments

Nuclear Expert: This is just 1st radioactive wave hitting U.S. and Canada; Fukushima pouring into ocean, unstoppable for years and years — Marine Expert: No sign it will stop anytime soon; Plant unstable, potentially worse than Chernobyl (AUDIO)

 

02:10 PM EST on January 21st, 2014 | 258 comments

Marine Chemist: Latest numbers I have are Fukushima released 80 Quadrillion Bq of cesium-137 (Chernobyl estimated at 70 Quadrillion) — “The radioactive plume itself has actually arrived… it’s already here” on west coast (AUDIO)

 

10:37 AM EST on January 21st, 2014 | 272 comments

Scientific American: Fukushima will have to be entombed in sarcophagus if melted fuel in ‘bad enough’ situation — Radiation Expert: I think they’re going to put a fence around reactors and just watch site forever (VIDEO)

 

09:39 AM EST on January 21st, 2014 | 72 comments

Professor: “Reports of radiation in kelp just north of California” — Signs of Fukushima contamination expected to start “really arriving strongly” this year

 

01:09 AM EST on January 21st, 2014 | 76 comments

TV: High-level radiation leak at Fukushima reactor thought to be from “cracks in containment vessel” — “Even more radioactive than expected” — Salt corrosion may have led to breach (VIDEO)

 

09:08 PM EST on January 20th, 2014 | 78 comments

TV: Nuclear workers “stripped naked, soaked in sweat… gasping for air” — “My teeth started breaking off” — “It’s as if they are the living dead” — “Democracy destroyed in areas where nuclear power exists” (VIDEO)

 

03:34 PM EST on January 20th, 2014 | 118 comments

Officials by West Coast Speak Out on Fukushima: Concerns about cancer, illness from contaminated food — ‘Low-level’ radiation being reported in fish — “We cannot sit by and watch and wait” — National gov’t appears to not be taking it seriously

 

11:40 AM EST on January 20th, 2014 | 128 comments

Navy Sailor after Fukushima: I’m in a wheelchair, now it’s spreading to my arms and hands — Photo of skin with intense red burns after being in sun, suspects radiation intensified impact (AUDIO)

09:11 AM EST on January 20th, 2014 | 435 comments

Image published by embassy in Japan shows Fukushima melted fuel deep underground

 

06:12 AM EST on January 20th, 2014 | 72 comments

Bloomberg: ‘Highly radioactive’ leak at Fukushima Unit 3 — NHK: Melted fuel coolant thought to be flowing from containment vessel for ‘unknown reason’ — 24 Million Bq/liter of strontium, other beta emitters (VIDEO)

 

12:26 AM EST on January 20th, 2014 | 57 comments

Physician: Canadian gov’t withholding testing data; “Less confident about eating Pacific seafood now” — Top Scientist: “Sense of potential widespread disaster” from Fukushima

 

08:37 PM EST on January 19th, 2014 | 59 comments

20-year-old documentary foreshadows Fukushima: Men picked up in slums of Tokyo to go work at nuclear plants — Many become ill with radiation sickness — Too frightened to speak out (VIDEO)

 

04:46 PM EST on January 19th, 2014 | 98 comments

Nuclear Engineer: It’s a little alerting to see this many articles downplaying Fukushima health effects — You have to think, why is this happening? — Are they going to walk away from reactors and say sorry, there’s nothing we can do? (VIDEO)

 

01:30 PM EST on January 19th, 2014 | 131 comments

Senior Scientist: Second radioactive plume headed to California — “Effects of Fukushima will be increasing” as front edge of large water plume arrives — Levels to rise for years — “It’s a health and safety issue here” yet no one testing ocean (VIDEO)

 

11:45 AM EST on January 19th, 2014 | 77 comments

UC Berkeley Professor: California seeing Fukushima fallout won’t be a surprise — ‘Especially concerned’ after radioactive leaks at plant were admitted — “I’m not terribly confident in information Japan is sharing”

 

09:48 AM EST on January 19th, 2014 | 77 comments

Navy Sailor: Crew members lost control of their bowels after Fukushima radiation exposure, as skin rashes developed; “It was a real big problem” — Congress signs bill making military conduct health survey (VIDEO)

10:41 PM EST on January 18th, 2014 | 159 comments

Japan TV: ‘Problem on their hands’ at Fukushima, constant flow of water pouring from foot-wide leak at Reactor 3; “They don’t know where water it’s coming from” — WSJ: Radiation level spikes 60-fold in seconds nearby (VIDEO)

 

09:14 PM EST on January 18th, 2014 | 222 comments

Fire breaks out at U.S. nuclear plant, reactor shut down — Emergency alert lasts over 5 hours due to ‘equipment malfunction’ — Residents discuss fears after many recent problems (VIDEO)

 

06:06 PM EST on January 17th, 2014 | 262 comments

Fox News: Fukushima contamination is hitting California — “Humans are terrified” of eating it — “It’s an open question” about the risks — “You’re not scared? To me, if someone tells me there’s low levels of radioactivity in that fish…” (VIDEO)

 

03:31 PM EST on January 17th, 2014 | 232 comments

TV: “Many young people in Fukushima who are in high school have died suddenly”; Officials “ignore all the problems” — Former Mayor: People are always told “any disease they have is not caused by radiation” (VIDEO)

 

11:44 AM EST on January 17th, 2014 | 170 comments

Former Official in Fukushima: “This is a disaster of all humanity… the entire world” — “It’s on an international level, huge consequences” — “Now bigger than anything we can cope with” (VIDEO)

 

09:59 AM EST on January 17th, 2014 | 123 comments

TV: California seafood is tainted from Fukushima disaster, says chef — Anything from San Diego to Alaska removed — “It’s easy for people to be convinced there’s no harm now, that’s part of problem” (VIDEO)

 

01:00 AM EST on January 17th, 2014 | 76 comments

Japan TV: It gets worse every minute at Fukushima plant, groundwater mixing with melted fuel — Gundersen: There’s no end in sight because the nuclear core is in contact with groundwater (VIDEO)

 

 

07:39 PM EST on January 16th, 2014 | 416 comments

Gundersen: New development at Fukushima, “Essentially entire plant has a gamma ray haze over it… a haze of radioactive particles” — Tepco: It’s impossible to stop, using more shielding won’t help (AUDIO)

 

02:20 PM EST on January 16th, 2014 | 127 comments

Radio: US Navy sailors had radioactive snow ball fights off Fukushima — Crew “pretty well toast” after weeks on Pacific… significant cancers, incessant bleeding from anus or vagina, blindness — Debris from USS Reagan sent to Hanford nuclear waste site (AUDIO)

 

11:07 AM EST on January 16th, 2014 | 164 comments

Former Prime Minister of Japan: We’ve been lied to, nuclear experts lying to us… They’ve been telling a pack of lies — Governor: Tepco needs to reveal who gave orders to lie about Fukushima meltdowns (VIDEO)

 

09:10 AM EST on January 16th, 2014 | 81 comments

NPR Affiliate: Fukushima cesium detected in Alaska salmon sample — Radioactive plume has already reached West Coast — Concerned fishermen forced to pay for tests since officials not doing it — “People don’t trust gov’t… they don’t trust corporations” (AUDIO)

 

09:10 PM EST on January 15th, 2014 | 314 comments

Senior Scientist: Fukushima radiation already on West Coast of N. America — We don’t know how much is coming or how fast it’s moving, situation ‘evolving’ — Levels will continue to rise for years — Unprecedented event for Pacific, largest ever radioactive release into ocean (VIDEO)

 

04:36 PM EST on January 15th, 2014 | 158 comments

Professor: Fukushima material to be washing up for years on West Coast — “The fish are going to have some in them” — “People have the right to know what’s there” — “Probably not” enough to worry about

 

02:20 PM EST on January 15th, 2014 | 202 comments

Officials want data on U.S. Navy sailors Fukushima exposure — Defense Dept. directed to reveal all medical problems for USS Reagan crew — TV: We were in a nuclear plume, how can they say there’s no health risk? It makes you wonder since “so many people are having problems” (VIDEO)

 

 

12:56 PM EST on January 15th, 2014 | 162 comments

‘Pitiful’: Fukushima plume hitting West Coast and Alaska ‘any day now’ — No gov’t agency is monitoring ocean, “public has right to know” — We have to watch seafood and food web over the future (VIDEO)

 

10:47 PM EST on January 14th, 2014 | 407 comments

Fox Business: Leading ‘pro-nuclear’ scientist admits our nuclear plants are “dangerous” and “error-prone” — Agrees we don’t even know true extent of Fukushima disaster or its impact (VIDEO)

 

08:16 PM EST on January 14th, 2014 | 163 comments

“They’re All Gone”: Shock as sardines vanish off California — Fishermen didn’t find a single one all summer — Scientist: This is about the entire Pacific coast… Canada, Mexico, U.S. — NOAA: We don’t know why; The young aren’t surviving

 

02:32 PM EST on January 14th, 2014 | 254 comments

‘Game Changer’: Former Prime Ministers team up to win Tokyo election and end nuclear power — It’s endangering the existence of Japan… “Our nation’s survival is at stake” — “Could have biggest influence ever on national politics”

 

11:25 AM EST on January 14th, 2014 | 429 comments

TV: Fukushima confirms nightmarish potential of nuclear power; Public living with threat of worst-case scenarios on daily basis — Author: “Super catastrophe” looms at plant (VIDEO)

 

09:56 AM EST on January 14th, 2014 | 71 comments

Sickened Fukushima Worker: “Tepco is God… we are slaves” — Employees beaten, threatened with death for speaking out (VIDEO)

 

10:33 PM EST on January 13th, 2014 | 283 comments

California schools announce Fukushima testing: Imperative we monitor for any Fukushima contamination “that will be arriving this year” in ocean — LA Times claims levels are declining, fails to inform readers of radioactive plume crossing Pacific

 

07:45 PM EST on January 13th, 2014 | 153 comments

TV: Fukushima “is the most important issue going on in the world, everyone should stop what they’re doing and work together” — Newspaper Editor: Gov’t afraid to look into Fukushima as it could lead to destruction of fishing industry on West Coast (VIDEO)

04:58 PM EST on January 13th, 2014 | 369 comments

“Constant influx” of U.S. sailors coming forward with problems after service off Fukushima — Gundersen: “Health effects of the Reagan crew are real… these brave men and women were exposed to high levels of radiation” (AUDIO)

01:04 AM EST on January 13th, 2014 | 421 comments

Japan TV: ‘State’ of Fukushima melted fuel unknown — Asahi: They “still do not know exactly what is going on inside” — U.S. NRC: Increased radioactive leaks at plant are “traveling underground to sea” (VIDEO)

 

03:52 PM EST on January 12th, 2014 | 221 comments

TV: Navy officer now confined to wheelchair after Fukushima radiation exposure — Doctors can’t explain “puzzling” ailments, leg muscles just gave up — Wife was in shock: “We don’t know how much time we have left together” (VIDEO)

 

10:32 AM EST on January 12th, 2014 | 388 comments

Radiation Expert: Fukushima plant “out of control” — Nuclear fuel “is now in the ground… no way they can get at it” — “Will just wash uranium out to sea” — Pollution of Pacific Ocean to continue more or less forever (AUDIO & VIDEO)

 

01:16 AM EST on January 12th, 2014 | 175 comments

Gundersen: U.S. gov’t buying 14 Million potassium iodide pills used during nuclear disasters — “I don’t know why they placed this big order right now” (AUDIO)

 

07:49 PM EST on January 11th, 2014 | 252 comments

Official: Tepco has failed at Fukushima, no progress made — Tepco to change name, start new business — Tepco demands nuclear workers return payments, anger passed tipping point

 

01:27 PM EST on January 11th, 2014 | 322 comments

California Official: Information on risk from Fukushima needs to be made public — State in contact with NRC — CBS: ‘Health Scare Over Possible Fukushima Radiation In Pacific-Caught Fish’ — Surfer: I’d never go surfing right now (VIDEO)

 

09:14 AM EST on January 11th, 2014 | 237 comments

Kyodo: Radiation surged at Fukushima, gov’t tells Tepco “take action” — Asahi: Fish found with “extremely high levels” of radioactive material 40 km from plant

 

 

 

05:09 PM EST on January 10th, 2014 | 152 comments

Radiation jumps around Fukushima plant — Now ~1,000% previous levels — Tepco kept strontium-90 data secret for months — Officials knew of increase but ‘too busy’ to do anything — Gov’t holds Friday meeting about what can be done

 

02:29 PM EST on January 10th, 2014 | 212 comments

Host: Fukushima may be one of biggest events to ever affect us in modern times — Gundersen: It should be ‘Level 8′ on INES scale (AUDIO)

 

12:16 PM EST on January 10th, 2014 | 113 comments

Professor’s Diary: Fukushima radioactive material “has reached the west coast as of June 2013 by ocean transport” — Health risks to be determined by ongoing monitoring

 

08:45 AM EST on January 10th, 2014 | 119 comments

NRC comments on steam at Fukushima Unit 3 — Gundersen: Plutonium could be causing fissions, heating up melted fuel (AUDIO)

 

12:12 AM EST on January 10th, 2014 | 70 comments

ABC in Fukushima: Radiation to be at U.S. coast early this year — Expert concerned about effects on food chain from unprecedented amount of migrating radioactivity — They tried to stop leaks, it’s just not working — Tepco: We don’t know what’s gone into ocean (VIDEO)

 

08:21 PM EST on January 9th, 2014 | 152 comments

Gundersen: I’m now not eating Pacific Ocean fish — Bio-accumulation of Fukushima nuclear waste concerning — Effects of lower-level radiation worse than predicted (VIDEO)

 

05:59 PM EST on January 9th, 2014 | 337 comments

‘Pacific Wasteland’? Japan Gov’t Scientist: ‘Big problem’ for whole ocean if Fukushima’s water released with strontium-90 — TV: It may not get filtered out; “All bets are off” without way to plug plant leaks — NHK: All decontamination systems stop working, may not restart for “long time” (VIDEO)

 

04:30 PM EST on January 9th, 2014 | 107 comments

TV: Fukushima plant “an undefused bomb for decades to come” — Japan Journalist: They only have the vaguest idea of what happened to 100s of tons of molten fuel — An ongoing crisis on edge of disaster

 

01:05 AM EST on January 9th, 2014 | 511 comments

Multiple marine scientists say Fukushima plume is at West Coast — S.F. Chronicle reports “radiation levels from Fukushima on California coast have gone down”

 

03:48 PM EST on January 8th, 2014 | 396 comments

New Journal Article: Fukushima may have already released 90 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 — Much more than Chernobyl’s 70 quadrillion becquerels

 

12:09 PM EST on January 8th, 2014 | 208 comments

NPR and California Department of Public Health appear on document with nuclear-related U.S. entities ‘working together’ with Tepco to ‘disseminate’ Fukushima-related information — CDHP Yesterday: West Coast will get NO radioactive contamination from Fukushima (PHOTO)

 

09:15 AM EST on January 8th, 2014 | 435 comments

Radiation Expert: It’s terrifying how Pacific ecosystem has collapsed since Fukushima — Plutonium and uranium suspected of spreading through food chain (VIDEO)

 

12:20 AM EST on January 8th, 2014 | 177 comments

Hot spots at 1,400% baseline radiation levels on San Francisco-area coast — State: It’s “naturally occurring materials not radioactivity associated with Fukushima” — Expert: Don’t let babies or kids inhale or eat the sand

 

05:06 PM EST on January 7th, 2014 | 214 comments

Agency: Dead Conjoined Baby Gray Whales found on West Coast of N. America — Could be first ever recorded — 2 heads and 2 tails, joined in middle (PHOTOS & VIDEO)

 

03:05 PM EST on January 7th, 2014 | 193 comments

CBS: “Health officials are investigating radiation levels” along coast near San Francisco after finding “higher than typical readings” — UC Berkeley Professor: “Absolutely no correlation” with nuclear disaster; Compares eating banana to drinking water from Fukushima plant (VIDEO)

 

12:38 PM EST on January 7th, 2014 | 426 comments

Secrecy agreement between Fukushima and IAEA revealed by Tokyo newspaper — They hid health effects in Chernobyl… same thing could happen to Fukushima”

12:56 AM EST on January 7th, 2014 | 430 comments

Nuclear Chemistry Expert: Steam at Fukushima reactor could be from corium burning through containment into groundwater

 

12:35 PM EST on January 6th, 2014 | 179 comments

Harvard Website: Media blindly reports Tepco’s false radiation levels, says Fukushima official; Press won’t report truth — “It’s still scary” in Tokyo, people move away due to hotspots; “Environment abruptly changed for half of Japan” (VIDEO)

 

10:06 AM EST on January 6th, 2014 | 487 comments

Nuclear Journal on ‘Fukushima Plutonium Effect’: Melting MOX fuel may lead to neutron flux blow-up — ‘Surprisingly’ there’s absolutely no reference data in any scientific literature

 

11:38 PM EST on January 5th, 2014 | 302 comments

L.A. Times: Alarming West Coast sardine crash likely radiating through ecosystem — Experts warn marine mammals and seabirds are starving, may suffer for years to come — Boats return without a single fish — Monterey Bay: Hard to resist idea that humpback whales are trying to tell us something

 

07:23 PM EST on January 5th, 2014 | 163 comments

TV: “Massive radioactivity release” at Fukushima going on for almost 3 years now; Visible steam “just the tip of the iceberg” — NHK: Containment vessels are ‘broken’ (VIDEOS)

 

05:20 PM EST on January 5th, 2014 | 45 comments

“We see radiation from Fukushima in soils in Southern California, especially our desert regions” — High concentrations in seaweed prevented harvest this year — Also found in cattle and chicken feed (AUDIO)

 

12:13 PM EST on January 5th, 2014 | 94 comments

ABC News: Gov’t, scientists ‘baffled’ over white spots on cows around Fukushima plant — Farmer: No one knows what they are, I think it’s from radiation; “Our town’s contaminated like Chernobyl… We were just thrown away like trash” — Officials order the animals to be slaughtered (VIDEOS)

 

 11:43 PM EST on January 4th, 2014 | 212 comments

CEO: Fukushima is very bad, we have a crew in Japan right now; Reports coming out that gov’t covered it up… food around whole region got irradiated, increased problems for people in Tokyo — Host: Really scares me I don’t hear anyone discussing how to stop it (VIDEO)

 

12:07 AM EST on January 4th, 2014 | 396 comments

Official detects radiation spike on California beach, now at 500% normal levels — ‘Befuddled’ as to why it’s so high, claims there’s no ‘immediate’ health concern — Public’s interest in Fukushima nuclear waste rising (VIDEO)

 

06:10 PM EST on January 3rd, 2014 | 74 comments

Expert: Source informed me that areas by U.S. nuclear plants are becoming ‘seismically active’; Studies underway right now — NRC ‘Official Use Only’: Quakes can actually happen almost anywhere (AUDIO)

 

12:01 PM EST on January 3rd, 2014 | 206 comments

Nuclear Engineer: Radioactive plumes always coming out of Fukushima Unit 3 — “Water is not getting to hotspots… it’s because of melted core” — Fission may be taking place underneath reactor (AUDIO)

 

09:39 AM EST on January 3rd, 2014 | 108 comments

Senior Scientist: Fukushima cores melted through the containment vessels — I’m very concerned about sea life on West Coast accumulating radioactive material; Some contamination will arrive in concentrated pockets (AUDIO)

 

09:39 PM EST on January 2nd, 2014 | 102 comments

Top Russian Nuclear Official: Fukushima catastrophe matched our worst-case scenario — U.S. Gov’t Email: Radiation release thought to be 500 times higher than we calculated

 

01:34 PM EST on January 2nd, 2014 | 248 comments

Wall St. Journal: Plutonium levels 1,000 times normal on seafloor 50 miles from San Francisco — Expert Appalled: Major nuclear dump offshore is a threat to health — Around 50,000 containers of radioactive waste in globally significant ecosystem

 

10:12 AM EST on January 2nd, 2014 | 244 comments

Nuclear Expert: Fukushima reactor cores melted right down into the ground — That radioactive material is getting washed out into Pacific Ocean (AUDIO)

08:50 PM EST on January 1st, 2014 | 190 comments

BBC Interview: “News about Fukushima… keeps getting worse” — Japan Professor: “Rash of disease” in Fukushima children, rate of cancer in thyroid up to “dozens of times higher than usual” — Expert: Forcible radiation exposure by gov’t (AUDIO)

04:21 PM EST on January 1st, 2014 | 242 comments

Gundersen: Very visible steam at Fukushima Unit 3 is from constant radioactive releases — Coming from hot rubble, not related to new explosion

 

01:56 PM EST on January 1st, 2014 | 73 comments

Officials: Unprecedented disease outbreak to blame for dozens of bald eagles deaths — “A major development.. really kind of undocumented” — Concern virus may have mutated — Brains hemorrhaging, immune systems not fighting it off, why are they now more susceptible? (VIDEO)

 

05:49 PM EST on December 31st, 2013 | 283 comments

Gizmodo Report Claims: “Fukushima could be in the middle of another meltdown” — 300th most popular website in U.S. publishes “unsubstantiated rumor”

 

01:24 PM EST on December 31st, 2013 | 85 comments

9 quakes hit same area near Fukushima border in past few hours — New island along ‘Ring of Fire’ south of Tokyo now over 15 times initial size in a month — Professor: “Massive volcanic eruption… We should pay close attention” (VIDEOS)

 

09:41 AM EST on December 31st, 2013 | 70 comments

Forbes: “This is outrageous” — Homeless people are being sold to companies and put to work on Fukushima radiation – Gov’t-funded shelter supplying gangsters with workers (VIDEOS)

 

01:17 AM EST on December 31st, 2013 | 41 comments

Gundersen: U.S. Navy sailors suffered horrific radiation exposures off Fukushima coast — Massive government cover-up going on for many years (VIDEOS)

 

11:39 PM EST on December 30th, 2013 | 58 comments

UPI: Quake rocks northeast Japan — Intensity 5- out of 7 on seismic scale — Mainichi: M5.4 quake jolts eastern Japan — Near Fukushima border, buildings rocked in Tokyo (MAP)

  

09:26 PM EST on December 30th, 2013 | 69 comments

Former MSNBC host told not to warn people about Fukushima meltdowns: “The official gov’t position is that it’s safe” — “Now go explain that to people who served on the USS Ronald Reagan” (VIDEO)

 

05:12 PM EST on December 30th, 2013 | 118 comments

Lead Researcher: Fukushima pollution may be causing sea star epidemic on West Coast — Sea urchins, sea cucumbers also affected — “Something’s making them susceptible”… “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen”… “Populations go locally extinct overnight”

 

03:24 PM EST on December 30th, 2013 | 64 comments

LA Times: Experts suggest bald eagle deaths are related to Fukushima radiation — Idaho officials reporting similar sickness — “It’s hard to have your national bird in your arms, going through seizures” (AUDIO)

 

09:23 PM EST on December 29th, 2013 | 268 comments

UN Official ‘Astounded’: Homeless are taken to work in Fukushima, ready to die — Pastor: “At end of month, they’re left with no pay” — Police: They end up in debt to employers after food and housing fees deducted (VIDEO)

 

06:29 PM EST on December 29th, 2013 | 64 comments

Newspaper: Unprecedented declines in Alaska king salmon… related to impact from Fukushima? No comment, says NOAA biologist — Record low numbers seen in major fishery on Canada’s west coast, “alarming decrease”

 

01:16 PM EST on December 29th, 2013 | 262 comments

Gundersen: Nuclear fuel has been moved by groundwater at Fukushima Daiichi — It’s time to walk away from plant for next 100 years once there’s an underground sarcophagus — Much more difficult to contain than Chernobyl (VIDEO)

 

09:35 AM EST on December 29th, 2013 | 186 comments

‘High Alert’: Mystery illness killing bald eagles in Western U.S. — Wings paralyzed, full blown seizures — Experts: “Very big concern”… “Never seen anything like this”… “We just don’t know what’s going on” (VIDEOS)

 

08:47 PM EST on December 28th, 2013 | 198 comments

Steam coming from Fukushima Unit 3 reactor building — Observed multiple times this week

03:57 PM EST on December 28th, 2013 | 74 comments

Epidemiologist back from Fukushima: “We’re talking about a sacrifice zone and millions of people live in this area” — Exceeds allowable radiation dose for nuclear workers 40 kilometers from Fukushima plant (VIDEO)

12:31 PM EST on December 28th, 2013 | 120 comments

Navy Times: Now 70+ men & women report suffering from Fukushima radiation — Testicle removal, optic nerve removal, leukemias, polyps… were in their early 20s with good health (VIDEO)

 

10:32 AM EST on December 28th, 2013 | 90 comments

Engineer: 6 experts say nuclear explosion at reactor is possible — NRC: Fukushima Unit 3 explosion had 3 loud bangs, much larger than Unit 1 blast — Tokyo professor’s presentation adds question mark: “Hydrogen explosion of Reactor #3?” (VIDEO)

 

02:05 AM EST on December 28th, 2013 | 72 comments

Experts: Fukushima can’t be excluded as factor in sea stars turning to goo along West Coast; It hasn’t been ruled out — They’re “particularly proficient” at absorbing radioisotopes; 1,000 times more plutonium than fish (AUDIO)

 

07:34 PM EST on December 27th, 2013 | 70 comments

Radio: Experts warn ocean currents spreading Fukushima contamination across world — Official 4,000 miles away: Radiation in seafood imports increased noticeably; Time for all stakeholders to be on alert (AUDIO)

 

02:31 PM EST on December 27th, 2013 | 112 comments

Reports: Highly significant quantity of fission products are flushed into environment by water used on Fukushima molten fuel, including plutonium and curium — Radioactivity to recirculate for many generations in ocean food chain, meat content will increase with time

 

10:38 AM EST on December 27th, 2013 | 190 comments

Experts: Fukushima disaster victims to include up to 600,000 deaths, over 100,000 still-births, and over 100,000 children with genetic deformations

 

09:12 AM EST on December 27th, 2013 | 127 comments

Post-Fukushima Report: Concern over Plutonium and Uranium being deposited and re-concentrating far away — Isotopes transfer to land via sea spray, aerosols, flooding — Human exposure by inhalation, food, contact

 

12:00 AM EST on December 27th, 2013 | 1,042 comments

FORUM: Fukushima Webcam Discussion Thread

 

08:55 AM EST on December 26th, 2013 | 255 comments

IAEA Paper: Corium was not cooled in majority of tests using water injected from above, as done at Fukushima — Were studying how to stop molten core from melting through concrete

 

11:17 PM EST on December 25th, 2013 | 131 comments

Russian Experts: Fukushima pollution spreads all over Earth, clearly a large amount of fish, seaweeds, and everything in ocean has been polluted — These products are the main danger for mankind as they can end up being eaten by people on a massive scale

 

04:34 PM EST on December 25th, 2013 | 142 comments

TV: Fukushima fish making it to stores, loads brought into port daily — Experts: Very, very high cesium levels in sediments; Most fish in area are radiated — Lab: We’ve never found radiation, it’s safe — Tepco: It’s pretty much under control, fences keep pollution out of ocean (VIDEO)

 

02:19 PM EST on December 25th, 2013 | 93 comments

Official: Expect airborne radiation releases from Fukushima to increase — Seafood catches off U.S. Pacific coast more likely to be contaminated than ones far closer to Japan — ‘Gravest danger’ to public is if they eat these products

 

11:52 AM EST on December 25th, 2013 | 79 comments

Merry Christmas from ENENews (+ webcam discussion thread info…)

 

09:26 AM EST on December 25th, 2013 | 81 comments

Fukushima Mother: ‘Strange smell’ at start of nuclear disaster — Health of entire family has deteriorated — More people who stayed have died, more kids have leukemia and cancer — All our thyroid exams turned out totally different when tested in Tokyo (VIDEO)

 

06:44 PM EST on December 24th, 2013 | 171 comments

New model shows U.S. was hit by Fukushima cloud that dispersed little over Pacific — Gundersen: Authorities knew about hot particles and didn’t warn public; Could have worn air masks, instead it’s stuck in their lungs; Helicopters did secret survey along coast (PHOTO & AUDIO)

 

10:43 PM EST on December 23rd, 2013 | 87 comments

6-foot tsunami that hit near New Jersey nuclear plant may be first of its kind in U.S. — People injured, swept out to sea by wave detected as far as Puerto Rico — NOAA said continental shelf may have slumped, now suspects ‘atmospheric event’ (VIDEO)

 

01:58 PM EST on December 23rd, 2013 | 287 comments

Previously unpublished map from gov’t scientists shows Fukushima plume already at Alaska coast (PHOTO)

 

09:50 AM EST on December 23rd, 2013 | 69 comments

Reports: “You can expect an enormous amount of cancers” around Pacific — “We’re all at risk, this radiated water is going to hit right here” in U.S. — We’re at top of food chain, so we get highest radiation dose — 35+ people now suffering cancer after U.S. rescue mission off Fukushima (VIDEO)

 

12:26 AM EST on December 23rd, 2013 | 132 comments

Japan experts voice alarm over “surge in cancers among young in Fukushima” — Gov’t told to “implement measures now” and be prepared for surge to increase further

 

09:04 PM EST on December 22nd, 2013 | 91 comments

NY Post: Snow falling on Navy ship caused by Fukushima radioactive steam… “Is that aluminum foil I taste?” — Sailor: People were defecating on themselves in hallways from excruciating diarrhea — Officer: We saw radiation 300 times ‘safe’ levels (VIDEO)

 

04:02 PM EST on December 22nd, 2013 | 70 comments

Experts: “Really an off year” — Pelicans starving in Pacific Northwest since 2011, killing baby birds for food — Breeding success “really poor” since 2011 — “I believe pelicans are responding to large scale changes” — “Sardine crash” persists in Pacific since decline in 2011

 

12:33 PM EST on December 22nd, 2013 | 88 comments

Navy Rescuer: Japan refused to let us in during 3/11 operation, said ship too radioactive; We were literally chased by a death sentence, radiation was everywhere — Gundersen: “Like a horror movie where beast never gets killed… Worst yet to come for Pacific” (VIDEO)

 

 

11:51 PM EST on December 21st, 2013 | 100 comments

“Unprecedented activity” near Canada’s West Coast: Whales in record numbers, displaying highly unusual behavior — Expert: Problems in Pacific could be bringing sea life to area; “Something’s amiss out there”

05:10 PM EST on December 21st, 2013 | 161 comments

Prime Minister’s Wife: “Fukushima calamity beyond people’s assumptions… So much hidden… I hope they will make everything public” — Inside Source: They’re now trying to get people 55 & older to work on Fukushima reactors

 

12:38 PM EST on December 21st, 2013 | 106 comments

Gov’t scientists concerned Atlantic Ocean to be contaminated by Fukushima plume now in Pacific — Currents would carry it to U.S. East Coast (PHOTOS)

 

01:16 AM EST on December 21st, 2013 | 209 comments

TV: Worries at Fukushima as radioactive materials found 80+ feet below Unit 4 — Record high contamination in groundwater near Unit 2 (VIDEO)

 

08:05 PM EST on December 20th, 2013 | 62 comments

Fox Host: I wasn’t aware sickness among Navy sailors was so widespread after Fukushima; Experts say dangerous radioactive releases to air and ocean — Tepco didn’t give U.S. radiation data for 3 to 4 days (VIDEOS)

 

05:25 PM EST on December 20th, 2013 | 69 comments

Fox News: “So many US sailors coming forward” with symptoms after mission near Fukushima; “Strange lumps all over… he’d been poisoned with radiation”; Hemorrhaging, cancers, leukemia, tumors — Another 50 service members may join lawsuit

 

02:21 PM EST on December 20th, 2013 | 85 comments

Canadian Gov’t Scientists: Model shows levels from Fukushima will exceed ‘maximum fallout’ in Pacific — “Not a human health radiological threat!”

 

11:22 AM EST on December 20th, 2013 | 71 comments

Gov’t Report: Fukushima ocean plume hit Canada 6 months ago — “Precedes model predictions by several years” — ‘Human health’ is first reason listed for study (MAP)

 

08:57 AM EST on December 20th, 2013 | 94 comments

Investigation Chairman: “One Fukushima may destroy the whole country” — “Collapse of a whole country possible”

01:01 AM EST on December 20th, 2013 | 167 comments

Gundersen: “The real apocalyptic thing would be an earthquake” at Fukushima — We’ve got to move quickly on Unit 3, it’s by far the worst structurally — Unit 4 a walk in the park comparatively (AUDIO)

 

08:00 PM EST on December 19th, 2013 | 52 comments

Nuclear Engineer: Fuel assembly damaged at Fukushima Unit 4 — It’s bent in shape of banana — Unknown if pellets poured into pool during removal — Tepco stopped English translations (AUDIO)

 

06:15 PM EST on December 19th, 2013 | 93 comments

Experts: Fukushima is “increasingly critical due to decay of buildings… reactor blocks are sinking… alarming cracks in foundation” — “It was built very poorly, Japan cannot deal with problem alone… it’s a big problem” (VIDEO)

 

04:19 PM EST on December 19th, 2013 | 61 comments

TV: 70 Navy sailors in new Fukushima lawsuit — They rode right into plume, could be thousands more seriously exposed — 1 or 2 sick could be coincidence, but 50-60 people in their 20s off one ship? Variety of cancers, blindness, impotence (VIDEO)

 

01:11 AM EST on December 19th, 2013 | 83 comments

Watch: Berkeley unanimously passes Fukushima resolution — Officials: “Very serious… I’m quite sobered by it”; “I’m glad we’re taking a stand”; State should get involved; Affects entire coast, we all need to get together and take action; “Work of activists… is paying off with public support” (VIDEO)

 

07:45 PM EST on December 18th, 2013 | 194 comments

Sickened Navy crew members have lawsuit dismissed — TV: “Sailors say they have cancer”… of thyroid, gallbladder, testicles — Unremitting headaches, rectal bleeding, tumors, bodies deteriorating (VIDEO)

 

03:06 PM EST on December 18th, 2013 | 142 comments

CBS promotes Fukushima-area seafood; Better if it’s allowed to contain more radioactive waste? — CBS email to US Gov’t: The best way for NRC to calm Americans’ nuclear anxiety is to be interviewed by ’60 Minutes’

  

11:54 AM EST on December 18th, 2013 | 167 comments

IAEA ***NOT for distribution***: Molten core is suspected to have penetrated Fukushima containment vessel — Prime Minister on 3/11: We couldn’t be in Tokyo if melted fuel went through containment vessel (VIDEO)

 

05:39 PM EST on December 17th, 2013 | 136 comments

Tokyo Press Conference: Cancer is clearly increasing in Fukushima children, many experts starting to get concerned — Tepco has committed a crime; We’re going to the police tomorrow (VIDEO)

 

01:54 PM EST on December 17th, 2013 | 95 comments

AP: ‘Tritium rain’ to result from disposal of Fukushima contaminated water? Expert: You may be interested to know radioactive rainfall occurs around nuclear plants during normal operations (VIDEO)

 

10:18 AM EST on December 17th, 2013 | 85 comments

Official: Fukushima fuel melted “on unprecedented scale” — French Gov’t: Parts of the coriums have been dispersed — AP: It’s location and condition are unknown

 

08:05 AM EST on December 17th, 2013 | 67 comments

(UPDATED) Radiation in Fukushima groundwater skyrockets 3,500+ times over weekend — Just 5 meters from Pacific Ocean — Nothing being done to stop it flowing into sea (PHOTO)

 

12:59 AM EST on December 17th, 2013 | 116 comments

Hot particle found 400 kilometers from Fukushima with radioactivity over 40 billion Bq/kg — Large black puddles of fallout along roadsides might well be from inside failed fuel rods (VIDEOS)

 

08:54 PM EST on December 16th, 2013 | 189 comments

Gundersen: All of Japan is contaminated, gov’t covering up enormous exposures to public; Epidemic is just beginning — Evacuee: We are in fact dying in Fukushima; What happened to us will soon affect all Japanese people (VIDEOS)

 

04:33 PM EST on December 16th, 2013 | 41 comments

Jiji: No solution seen for Fukushima’s radioactive water — Kyodo: Toxic ocean leakage to go on into 2020s — Experts: “High potential for marine life and human health effects through ingestion over generations”

 

02:30 PM EST on December 16th, 2013 | 72 comments

Officials Worried: Radiation levels rise sharply in soil outside Fukushima — Cesium quadruples during past year

 

11:21 AM EST on December 16th, 2013 | 79 comments

Releasing Fukushima radioactive water into Pacific ‘inevitable’ — Reports: Japan very aware of danger posed by past releases; Contaminants are concentrated thousands of times in food chain; At end of chain are humans “who may suffer genetic damage, cancer, other health problems and even death”

 

09:29 AM EST on December 16th, 2013 | 35 comments

Japan Professor: Damage from Fukushima is unprecedented, a disaster never before experienced in human history; Some say it could affect whole northern hemisphere — Experts: “Very likely the largest nuclear accident which mankind experienced”

 

01:43 AM EST on December 16th, 2013 | 133 comments

Gov’t Report: CNN, Huffington Post listed as ‘external stakeholders’ in NRC, alongside nuclear industry and pro-nuclear blogs — Both outlets help NRC to increase online influence, as CNN produces pro-nuclear infomercial

11:31 PM EST on December 15th, 2013 | 182 comments

Michael Moore: Thank you so much for making pro-nuclear movie — What a risky, brave idea — France doesn’t seem to have problems with it — I hear ‘Solar and wind are not going to save us’ — I’m concerned about statements by environmental groups against nuclear power (VIDEO)

 

06:17 PM EST on December 14th, 2013 | 393 comments

Tepco: We should have told public this sooner… we failed to cool molten fuel after meltdowns began — Experts: Fukushima cesium release could be more than triple Chernobyl (PHOTO)

 

10:03 AM EST on December 14th, 2013 | 73 comments

Asahi: Radiation levels spike to record high in Fukushima groundwater well nearby ocean — Trench failures to blame, says Tepco — Million times more strontium/beta-ray source than cesium

 

 09:39 PM EST on December 13th, 2013 | 133 comments

Japan’s Leader on 3/11: Most don’t know, but Reactor 1 melted down in 5 hours; We almost lost 1/3 of nation due to Fukushima — Tepco: Reactor 3 melted earlier than reported, water went in wrong pipes — NHK: Investigation into how such massive amounts of radioactive substances were released (VIDEO)

 

03:38 PM EST on December 13th, 2013 | 242 comments

‘Unprecedented’: China bans all imports of shellfish from U.S. West Coast — Official: “They’ve never done anything like that that I’ve ever seen” — Includes Washington, Oregon, Alaska and N. California — Gov’t says it will continue indefinitely (AUDIO)

 

09:09 AM EST on December 13th, 2013 | 148 comments

TV Correspondent in Japan: I’ve come across terrible information — Health situation appears to be “much more risky” than what we see on Japan TV — Doctors and officials hiding the truth (VIDEO)

 

08:59 PM EST on December 12th, 2013 | 87 comments

Marine Biologist: All the sea stars along west coast of North America could be wiped out — Some developing ‘bald spots’; “Others look completely healthy except for guts coming out” — ‘Speculation’ it could be related to Fukushima

 

02:28 PM EST on December 12th, 2013 | 88 comments

Large die-off of Alaska seabirds from disease never found before in state history — Official: It’s super, super common… except it’s first time — Hundreds dead per km²; Continued to wash ashore — ‘Relatively’ natural; Witness: Head flopped backward, appeared to have seizure, then dropped dead (AUDIO)

 

12:03 PM EST on December 12th, 2013 | 124 comments

Fukushima Evacuee: We’re human guinea-pigs in an experiment… we’ll never forgive gov’t or Tepco! — US Attorney: It’s up to the American people to make them pay; Japan is threatening to put people who speak out in concentration camps (AUDIO)

 

09:26 AM EST on December 12th, 2013 | 107 comments

CNN: The Pacific has seen its fair share of weird recently — Bay in California “now a massive soup bowl” — “Miles of anchovies, mountains deep” — It’s like none ever recorded… Old timers have never seen anything like this — “We may be experiencing ‘global weirding’” (VIDEO)

 

01:02 AM EST on December 12th, 2013 | 138 comments

Another 20 Navy Sailors: USS Ronald Reagan crew with thyroid cancers, leukemia, brain tumors, bleeding, blindness after Fukushima disaster — Young kids developing problems — Gov’t and Tepco involved in major conspiracy (AUDIO)

 

06:44 PM EST on December 11th, 2013 | 147 comments

Study: Type of dead sea creature covered 98% of ocean floor last year about 150 miles off California coast; Unprecedented, was below 1% prior to event — ‘Major’ changes began in spring 2011

 

04:49 PM EST on December 11th, 2013 | 131 comments

“In 2013, people really interested in radioactive fallout” — US gov’t studying public attention to Fukushima, tracks twitter searches — NRC FOIA: “Libyan war news should now downgrade Fukushima”

 

08:03 PM EST on December 10th, 2013 | 149 comments

University researchers assess impact of Fukushima plume on U.S.; Some models show near straight line to West Coast — Experts: Radionuclides didn’t dilute offshore as officials had claimed, “cause for serious alarm” (VIDEOS)

 

01:25 PM EST on December 10th, 2013 | 202 comments

US Nuclear Officials: Fuel fragments were likely ejected from cladding at the 3 Fukushima reactors — Particles of fuel resemble highly radioactive ‘mystery black substance’ often seen in Japan since 3/11 (PHOTOS)

 

03:08 AM EST on December 10th, 2013 | 157 comments

Berkeley official requests Health Dept. inform public of elevated risks from Fukushima contamination; Council to vote on plan next week — Fairfax Official: “No one’s monitoring radiation levels on West Coast… Gov’t is not doing its job” (VIDEO)

 

12:07 AM EST on December 10th, 2013 | 52 comments

Explosion and blaze inside protected area at U.S. nuclear plant in Arkansas — Transformer blows in Unit Two, causes fire that was not contained for 1.5 hours — “Loud, ground shaking explosion” reported — Reactor remains shut down, extent of damage unknown (PHOTOS & VIDEO)

  

07:35 PM EST on December 9th, 2013 | 61 comments

“Weird things” happening on California coast: Previously unknown toxic algae blooms proliferating; Unprecedented mass of oxygen-poor water near shore — TV: Mystery strandings of large squid covered miles and experts baffled… “essentially killing themselves, it’s just really weird” (VIDEO)

 

04:06 PM EST on December 9th, 2013 | 134 comments

Nuclear Expert: Plutonium in water leaking into ocean is “the most dangerous thing” at Fukushima, it can be carried around world and end up on a beach or in fish — Researcher: Plutonium contamination “a serious threat to environment and human health” (AUDIO)

 

12:46 PM EST on December 9th, 2013 | 76 comments

SF Chronicle: Fukushima radiation possible culprit in huge starfish die off from Mexico to Alaska — Potential catastrophe, it’s extremely virulent “going on up and down coast… It’s going to change what’s out there pretty fundamentally”

 

10:48 AM EST on December 9th, 2013 | 142 comments

Director: We saw plutonium from Fukushima out in New Mexico desert — “Local and regional contaminations of plutonium in environment have resulted from nuclear accident”

 

07:10 PM EST on December 8th, 2013 | 107 comments

Report reveals highest level of radioactive xenon-133 to hit Canada after Fukushima over 6,000% more than gov’t website claims

 

04:13 PM EST on December 8th, 2013 | 85 comments

Record radiation level in underground water well near ocean at Fukushima — Tepco: “Rise in radiation readings is an obvious concern” — 1.4 billion Bq/m³ of strontium/beta emitters

 

01:18 AM EST on December 8th, 2013 | 81 comments

Canadian officials estimated Fukushima cesium-137 release almost double Chernobyl — Based on the “most conservative and credible” projections

 

07:01 PM EST on December 7th, 2013 | 219 comments

BBC: Work at Fukushima Unit 4 a “distraction”; The “real nightmare” is coming from 3 molten cores — NYTimes: Melted fuel is “all over the place… First goal is simply to stop uncontrolled releases of radioactive material” (AUDIO)

 

02:32 PM EST on December 7th, 2013 | 62 comments

Gundersen: When the radioactive plume hits West Coast in a few months “it’s not like it’s going to end” — Fukushima still pumping contamination into Pacific Ocean 1,000 days after disaster began (AUDIO)

 

11:02 AM EST on December 7th, 2013 | 215 comments

TV: Highest ever radiation levels detected outside reactor buildings at Fukushima — People exposed to it would die in 20 minutes (VIDEO)

 

01:02 AM EST on December 7th, 2013 | 91 comments

California town passes Fukushima resolution: “Urgent international rescue” needed at site — “Poses health and safety concerns to America’s West Coast” — “Much greater contamination is likely”

 

05:49 PM EST on December 6th, 2013 | 181 comments

Japan enacts state secrets law late Friday night amid revolt — “It criminalizes investigative journalism” — Terrorism defined as “imposing one’s opinions on others”

 

04:45 PM EST on December 6th, 2013 | 100 comments

Bloomberg: Fukushima isotopes are nearing West Coast — Official: U.S. ocean water to have 100 Bq/m3 of cesium-137?

 

12:53 AM EST on December 6th, 2013 | 143 comments

TV: Officials near San Francisco to monitor Fukushima plume, concerns for environment and food supply — Supervisor: The risks to Californians are concerning — Commissioner: We can’t rely on Japan or Tepco — Will waves of cesium and strontium pollute coast? (VIDEO)

 

05:32 PM EST on December 5th, 2013 | 201 comments

Japan Official: “This is the way the reign of terror begins!” — Lawmaker is “physically restrained”; Outrage as secrets bill rammed through — Final passage expected within hours (PHOTOS)

 

02:01 PM EST on December 5th, 2013 | 183 comments

Expert: It’s getting worse and worse at Fukushima plant; Infrastructure deteriorating, corroding very fast — Tepco Adviser: I doubt ice wall can help much — Scientist warns of radiation ‘pulse’ to ocean (AUDIO)

 

 

11:27 AM EST on December 5th, 2013 | 69 comments

Japan Doctor: “Completely beyond comprehension” how huge the contamination of ocean water will be — Fukushima radioactive material poured in landfills to enter sea — It’s spreading over whole world (VIDEO)

 

02:31 AM EST on December 5th, 2013 | 97 comments

Study: Evidence of “uncontrollable nuclear reaction” after Fukushima reactors shutdown — “Emerged criticality” supported by data (PHOTOS)

 

08:40 PM EST on December 4th, 2013 | 132 comments

Gov’t Doc.: Re-criticality a threat at Fukushima; Concern melted fuel to change it’s form — M.I.T. Q&A: Coolability of the molten corium is questionable (VIDEO)

 

01:25 PM EST on December 4th, 2013 | 175 comments

IAEA Official: “What we are trying to say is consider” putting all the toxic Fukushima water in Pacific — Impact on human health must be monitored — Nearby countries all against it (PHOTO)

 

10:11 AM EST on December 4th, 2013 | 110 comments

Top Official: Protesting secrecy law is act of terrorism — Japan gov’t promotes idea that you’re racist if avoiding Fukushima produce — Bloomberg: “The entire process has echoes of George Orwell” — Nuclear activists to be constantly spied on?

 

07:57 PM EST on December 3rd, 2013 | 116 comments

Japan Author: Fukushima disaster “impossible to control” — Senior Scientist: The sheer number of things going wrong… they’ve never solved any problems — Mutual Fund: Officials never regained control at plant

 

04:22 PM EST on December 3rd, 2013 | 104 comments

AP: Experts warn about ground sinking at Fukushima plant — Tepco Adviser: Reactor building structures likely degraded; “Containment degradation” concerns back in 2011

 

11:59 AM EST on December 3rd, 2013 | 74 comments

TV: All-time high radiation level in well at Fukushima plant 40 meters from Pacific — 1.1 billion Bq/m³ of strontium-90, other beta emitters — “Feared highly contaminated water leaking into ground” and being allowed to flow into sea (VIDEO)

 

10:34 AM EST on December 3rd, 2013 | 52 comments

Tepco Adviser: Fuel is damaged in two Fukushima pools — 150 billion Bq/m³ of Cesium-137 at Unit 3, possible second explosion after 3/11 — “Certainly appears something of significance occurred”

 

05:20 AM EST on December 3rd, 2013 | 174 comments

TV: Sea star die-off worse than thought; Now over entire West Coast; Going from one species to others — Gov’t tests ‘rule out’ Fukushima — Coincidence they’re all melting at once, or something fishy is going on in these waters (VIDEO)

 

12:47 AM EST on December 3rd, 2013 | 95 comments

Professor: “It’s true that about 70% of Japan’s territory is polluted” by Fukushima radioactive material; Tokyo contaminated with highly toxic radiation — “Experts worry about catastrophic impacts on health”

 

07:06 PM EST on December 2nd, 2013 | 46 comments

Study: Those lacking wisdom expected Fukushima plume to disperse before hitting West Coast — In reality “sharp features” were detected even after several days travel (PHOTO)

 

05:56 PM EST on December 2nd, 2013 | 115 comments

Gundersen: They want to dump all Fukushima’s radioactive water in Pacific — Tepco: It will be diluted, then released — Professor suggests pumping it out in deep ocean (VIDEOS)

 

04:59 PM EST on December 2nd, 2013 | 84 comments

Risk Expert: “High risk” of nuclear holocaust at Fukushima — Plant to keep emitting radioactive materials “for a thousand years or so” (AUDIO)

 

09:14 PM EST on December 1st, 2013 | 166 comments

Study finds giant strontium-90 release into body of water begins around 1,000 days after reactor meltdown — 1,000 days after 3/11 = December 2013 — Graphic shows very high levels discharged for tens of thousands of days

 

02:29 PM EST on December 1st, 2013 | 59 comments

Expert: People on West Coast right to be concerned about Fukushima plume — Things “could get much worse” — Lots of radioactivity flowing into ocean — Gov’t not testing water or fish (AUDIO)

 

 

04:05 AM EST on December 1st, 2013 | 162 comments

NBC Nightly News: “Another highly troubling report about what’s going on in the Pacific” — Millions of starfish ‘melt away’ from Alaska to California — Expert: Fukushima radiation ‘not ruled out’ as factor in epidemic — Very, very different than anything seen before (VIDEO)

 

11:14 PM EST on November 30th, 2013 | 36 comments

Whale Expert near Vancouver: In 30 years I’ve never ever seen this kind of behavior, “They must sense this is a safe place to be” — Captain: I’ve never seen anything like it in 50 years on Pacific — “One even placed its head on the boat” (VIDEO)

 

07:45 PM EST on November 30th, 2013 | 27 comments

Captain: Massive amount of debris off Hawaii, “You had to be there… just kept going & going… so odd it was in straight line” — Japan Expert: It’s accumulated off islands, warns of fish contamination — Rare dolphin washes up with heart problems & stomach lumps, last examined in 1980s

 

04:22 PM EST on November 30th, 2013 | 217 comments

CBS News: 100s of whales in bay on California coast; It’s never been like this, we just can’t even believe it — Experts: We just aren’t sure what’s going on; “A once-in-a-lifetime chance… unheard of, it’s unbelievable, nobody’s seen this” (VIDEO)

 

11:19 PM EST on November 29th, 2013 | 125 comments

Scientist: Leading edge of Fukushima plume is now showing up on West Coast — Fish Market Owner: My customers have a lot of concerns about the nuclear contamination, they’re very smart and educated… I didn’t expect this much concern (AUDIO)

 

06:28 PM EST on November 29th, 2013 | 210 comments

Insiders: State secrets bill meant to suppress Fukushima news — Japan public stunned as citizens could face years in prison — Man’s mouth “stuffed with cloth” after voicing opposition — Toxic leaks into ocean seem unstoppable, gov’t must plug the information instead (PHOTO)

=

Grady Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia

My best friend, Donnie Johnson, living in Lithonia, Georgia, has died.

Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Ga, took a healthy, 64 year old male, with a hernia issue, ignored the hernia issue, put him on a ton of other medications, claiming not to know what was wrong with him, and now, after many months, has finally killed him.

I hope everyone who had their hand in the situation is happy!

Donnie, may God hold you in the palm of His Hand….You are sorely missed!

What is the Statute of Limitation for Legal Malpractice Cases In Georgia?

Georgia Malpractice Statute of Limitations, a Quick Reference Guide

Jeff Barnes/Foreclosure Defense Nationwide “New Legal Issues”

NEW LEGAL ISSUES COMING UP IN TRIAL AND APPELLATE COURTS

DECEMBER 16, 2013

With the release of the US Bank admissions per our post of November 6, 2013; the issuance of the opinions from the Supreme Courts of Oregon and Montana holding that MERS is not the “beneficiary”; and recent opinions from various jurisdictions which are now, finally, holding that securitization-related issues are relevant in a foreclosure, a host of new legal issues are about to be litigated in the trial and appellate courts throughout the country. It has taken six (6) years and coast-to-coast work to get courts to realize that securitization of a mortgage loan raises issues as to standing, real party in interest, and the alleged authority to foreclose, and that the simplistic mantra of the “banks” and servicers of “we have the note, thus we win” is no longer to be blindly accepted.

One issue which we and others are litigating relates to mortgage loans originated by Option One, which changed its name to Sand Canyon Corporation and thereafter ceased all mortgage loan operations. Pursuant to the sworn testimony of the former President of Sand Canyon, it stopped owning mortgage loans as of 2008. However, even after this cessation of any involvement with servicing or ownership of mortgage loans, we see “Assignments” from Option One or Sand Canyon to a securitization trustee bank or other third party long after 2008.

The United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire concluded, with the admission of the President of Sand Canyon, that the homeowner’s challenge to the foreclosure based on a 2011 alleged transfer from Sand Canyon to Wells Fargo was not an “attack on the assignment” which certain jurisdictions have precluded on the alleged basis that the borrower is not a party to the assignment, but is a situation where no assignment occurred because it could not have as a matter of admitted fact, as Sand Canyon could not assign something it did not have. The case is Drouin v. American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. and Wells Fargo, etc., No. 11-cv-596-JL.

The Option One/Sand Canyon situation is not unique: there are many originating “lenders” which allegedly “assigned” mortgages or Deeds of Trust long after they went out of business or filed for Bankruptcy, with no evidence of post-closing assignment authority or that the Bankruptcy court having jurisdiction over a bankrupt lender ever granted permission for the alleged transfer of the loan (which is an asset of the Bankruptcy estate) out of the estate. Such a transfer without proof of authority to do so implicates bankruptcy fraud (which is a serious crime punishable under United States criminal statutes), and fraud on the court in a foreclosure case where such an alleged assignment is relied upon by the foreclosing party.

As we stated in our post of November 6, the admission of US Bank that a borrower is a party to any MBS transaction and that the loan is governed by the trust documents means that the borrower is, in fact, a party to any assignment of that borrower’s loan, and should thus be permitted to seek discovery as to any alleged assignment and all issues related to the securitization of the loan. We have put this issue out in many of our cases, and will be arguing this position at both the trial and appellate levels beginning early 2014.

Jeff Barnes, Esq., http://www.ForeclosureDefenseNationwide.com

http://enenews.com/releasing-fukushima-radioactive-water-into-sea-inevitable-reports-japan-very-aware-of-threat-posed-by-past-releases-contaminants-will-be-concentrated-thousands-of-times-throughout-food

Releasing Fukushima radioactive water into Pacific ‘inevitable’ — Reports: Japan very aware of danger posed by past releases; Contaminants are concentrated thousands of times in food chain; At end of chain are humans “who may suffer genetic damage, cancer, other health problems and even death” 

Published: December 16th, 2013 at 11:21 am ET

By ENENews

Yomiuri Shimbun, Dec. 16, 2013: Release of water into sea inevitable after purification at Fukushima plant […] The government has been in lockstep with TEPCO in a project to create as early as possible “frozen-soil underground water shields” […] Given that the project has never been attempted anywhere else, the risk of the project encountering difficulties cannot be ruled out. […] The volume of contaminated water currently stored already amounts to nearly 400,000 tons. […] Should the tanks be destroyed because of a calamity such as a strong earthquake, there is a danger that a large quantity of contaminated water could spill from them, like the collapse of a dam.

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster : One of the World’s Worst-Ever Cases of Pollution, Professor Fumikazu Yoshida of Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Economics, Economic Journal of Hokkaido University, March 2013: Now, the Nuclear Safety Commission has initially tolerated the dumping of radioactive contaminated water in the sea since they claim that it will be diluted. But even diluted in seawater contaminants will be concentrated thousands of times throughout the food chain. Such elementary knowledge concerning the environmental consequences of pollution […] is now apparently being forgotten. […]

The Fukushima Nuclear Power Station incident and marine pollution, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 2012: […] The facts indicate that Japan had already been very aware of the potential danger and effects that the emission might cause […] there remains a certain potential nuclear radiation threat to the neighbouring countries of Japan […] In the long run, the radioactive wastewater will have severe effect on fish including reduction in reproductive capability, morphological abnormalities, leukopenia, anorexia, lethargy, growth depression, and hyperactivity (Forman, 1983; Lomio, 1979). […] Furthermore, the radioactive wastes once enter into the marine food chain will be harmful to various kinds of animals and finally human being themselves who may suffer genetic damage, cancer, other health problems and even death from the nuclear radiation, since the final consumers at the end of the chain are often human (Forman, 1983). […] the ocean-related economy in the bordering states may also suffer from the radioactive wastes. If, however, the potentially injured states wait until the material damage happens, in order to claim damages from Japan, it would probably be too late. […] the reasonable principle of imputation is that so long as there is sufficient evidence to prove that the acts of a state might cause serious damage to the long-term development of the marine environment, this state should bear the responsibility for transboundary harm. […]

Read the full article in the Marine Pollution Bulletin here (pdf)

http://www.law.sdu.edu.cn/uploadfile/133648283029.pdf

  

http://enenews.com/fukushima-evacuee-human-guinea-pigs-experiment-never-forgive-govt-tepco-attorney-american-people-make-pay-japan-threatening-put-people-speak-concentration-camps-audio

Fukushima Evacuee: We’re human guinea-pigs in an experiment… we’ll never forgive gov’t or Tepco! — US Attorney: It’s up to the American people to make them pay; Japan is threatening to put people who speak out in concentration camps

Published: December 12th, 2013 at 12:03 pm ET

By ENENews

The Asia-Pacific Journal, Dec. 9, 2013 (translated by Tom Gill) — Shoji Masahiko, Fukushima evacuee: […] now what really matters is human health. […] The national government and the village mayor insist now as ever that they will decontaminate the village, that they will enable us to go home […] But why, when human life and health should be the top priority, should that be reason to choose return, return to the village, as a higher priority than the people’s health, our children’s health, our grandchildren’s health? – That is something I cannot fathom. For my part I have actually started to think that we are being used as the world’s first human guinea-pigs, in an experiment […] We will never forgive those responsible – the national government, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and those who helped make this happen!

 

http://enenews.com/gundersen-all-of-japan-is-contaminated-govt-covering-up-enormous-exposures-to-public-epidemic-is-just-beginning-evacuee-we-are-in-fact-dying-in-fukushima-what-happened-to-us-will-soon-affec

Gundersen: All of Japan is contaminated, gov’t covering up enormous exposures to public; Epidemic is just beginning — Evacuee: We are in fact dying in Fukushima; What happened to us will soon affect all Japanese people (VIDEOS)

Published: December 16th, 2013 at 8:54 pm ET

By ENENews

Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds, Dec. 16, 2013: The Japanese parliament has just passed the state secrets law. It’s really an information ‘iron curtain’ that’s preventing people in Japan from learning just how bad the exposures were that they received after the accident at Fukushima. […] They’re trying to underestimate the amount of radiation that the Japanese received […] I think they’re neglecting some really serious sources of radiation in their effort to convince the Japanese people that nuclear power is safe. […] These exposures not being calculated by the Japanese, or the IAEA, are in fact enormous. [..] Fukushima was 3 times worse than Chernobyl as far as the noble gases [e.g. xenon, krypton] that were released. […] There’s already a 10-fold increase in thyroid issues in Japan and we’re just at the beginning of the thyroid epidemic. […] As I discovered when I was in Tokyo during the book tour during 2012, all of Japan is a radiologically contaminated area, and the people in Japan need to take extraordinary precautions. The net effect of all this is the total exposure to the Japanese is being grossly underestimated. >> Watch the video here http://fairewinds.org/media/fairewinds-videos/japanese-government-isnt-saying-fukushima

 

Testimony of a Fukushima Evacuee, Oct. 30, 2013 — Miko from Iwaki City (at 7:00 in): What the state announces is different from the reality. […] As I just told you what the media says and the facts are entirely different.  […] What happened to Fukushima residents will soon affect all Japanese people […] While some say the radiation has dispersed, we are now safe people are in fact dying in Fukushima. One day a nephew of my friend died of Leukemia. The next day her husband also died. […] There are people living in Fuksuhima, now, they all say: “We’re guinea pigs after all […] many people are dying, huh? There’s nothing we can do, it’s useless, so why bother? I’d rather focus on happy things” and continue with their decontamination. […] People refuse to face the fact that these will eventually come back to haunt them. >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlWslcjHlPo

 

http://enenews.com/radiation-in-groundwater-skyrockets-3500-times-over-weekend-just-5-meters-from-pacific-no-steps-being-taken-to-stop-flow-into-ocean-photo

Radiation in Fukushima groundwater skyrockets 3,500+ times over weekend — Just 5 meters from Pacific Ocean — Nothing being done to stop it flowing into sea (PHOTO)

 
Published: December 17th, 2013 at 8:05 am ET 
By ENENews 
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59 comments

Tepco, Dec. 17, 2013: As a result of the measurement, it was found that the gross-β density in the groundwater observation hole No.0-3-2 obtained at the east of the Units 1-4 Turbine Buildings on December 16 [was] 63,000Bq/L […]

Jiji Press, Dec. 17, 2013: Highest Ever Radiation Detected in Fukushima Plant Well […] Some 63,000 becquerels of radioactive materials that emit beta rays, such as strontium-90, per liter have been found in groundwater […] the highest level at the well [Tepco] said Tuesday […] sample [was] taken on Monday from the observation well 5 meters from the coast […] Since the company is not takings steps to prevent tainted water in the well from flowing into the sea […] the water is likely to be reaching the plant’s bay. […] standards require strontium-90 levels to be less than 10 becquerels in water to be released into the sea. […]

 

 

http://enenews.com/ap-tritium-rain-to-result-from-disposal-of-fukushimas-contaminated-water-expert-radioactive-rainfall-goes-on-around-nuclear-plants-during-normal-operations-video

AP: ‘Tritium rain’ to result from disposal of Fukushima contaminated water? Expert: You may be interested to know radioactive rainfall occurs around nuclear plants during normal operations (VIDEO)

 
Published: December 17th, 2013 at 1:54 pm ET 
By ENENews 
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38 comments

Associated Press, Dec. 3, 2013: Experts on [the Japan government’s contaminated water] panel also proposed establishing a special team to focus on how to deal with massive amounts of tritium, the only isotope that cannot be removed chemically by existing technology. […] U.S. officials evaporated tritium water at the Three Mile Island plant following the 1979 accident, but the method is not recommended for Fukushima, where there is too much and it is likely to come back as tritium rain.

In fact, the method has been recommended for Fukushima

Joonhong Ahn, professor in UC Berkeley’s nuclear engineering department: Water that’s been treated to remove radionuclides apart from tritium, which can’t be filtered out, can be evaporated […] “Amounts of tritium would be small, so that radioactivity that would be discharged into the atmosphere would be acceptably small” […] discharging low-level contaminated water at the Fukushima station into the sea may need to be used in addition or as an alternative to evaporation.

Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, at the Community Symposium on Decommissioning San Onofre, Oct. 19, 2013 (26:45 in): You might also be interested to know that all nuclear power plants, that are of the variety of light water reactors, release tritium to the atmosphere, so you can expect radioactive rainfall around nuclear power plants. We have asked the NRC to require monitoring of rainfall — because people have private wells in many places – but they have refused to require it.

 

http://enenews.com/hot-particle-found-400-kilometers-fukushima-radioactivity-40-billion-bqkg-large-puddles-black-particles-found-roadside-video

Hot particle found 400 kilometers from Fukushima with radioactivity over 40 billion Bq/kg — Large black puddles of fallout along roadsides might well be from inside failed fuel rods (VIDEOS)

 
Published: December 17th, 2013 at 12:59 am ET 
By ENENews 
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86 comments

Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds, Dec. 16, 2013 (at 3:30 in): Large puddles of black particles have been found on the side of the road, each individual grain is extraordinarily radioactive. This is fall-out, this is hot particles that have coalesced together on the side of the road. Recently a hot particle was discovered 250 miles [400 kilometers] away from Fukushima. It was so radioactive that if it were a pound of material instead of just a particle, the pound would be giving off 20 billion disintegrations per second [44 billion becquerels per kilogram] […] That small speck could easily be lodged in someone’s lung. >> Watch the video here

Japan’s Black Dust, Fairewinds Energy Education, July 10, 2013: Marco Kaltofen, President at Boston Chemical Data Corp. & Doctoral student researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute: […] We kept hearing reports about something unusual, a black dust […] we finally got a very small sample […] It’s a single substance. It’s not a mix of mineral particles and pieces of dead bugs and plant matter and dust particles […] it doesn’t look like the surrounding soils. And it is much more intensely radioactive than any other soil or dust sample we’ve gotten from around Fukushima Daiichi. […]  There’s something unusual happening with this stuff. […] this particle contains not only fission waste products from the reactor but very likely contains a concentrated unburned nuclear fuel. And that’s unusual. This sample had by far the highest level of uranium daughters that we’ve seen in a dust or soil sample. We’re actually seeing material that might well have come from inside a failed fuel assembly. >> Watch the video here   http://fairewinds.org/podcast/japans-black-dust-with-marco-kaltofen

http://enenews.com/jiji-no-solution-seen-for-fukushimas-radioactive-water-kyodo-toxic-ocean-leakage-to-go-on-into-2020s-experts-high-potential-for-marine-life-and-human-health-effects-through-ingestion-over

Jiji: No solution seen for Fukushima’s radioactive water — Kyodo: Toxic ocean leakage to go on into 2020s — Experts: “High potential for marine life and human health effects through ingestion over generations”

 
Published: December 16th, 2013 at 4:33 pm ETBy ENENews 

Jiji Press, Dec. 16, 2013: No Solution in Sight for Fukushima N-Plant Tainted Water […] No solution is in sight as [Tepco] struggles with ever-increasing amounts of radioactive water […] The situation has improved little in the [past] six months […] very high-level radioactive water has been detected under the ground […] TEPCO detected 1.8 million becquerels of radioactive materials per liter of water collected on Thursday from an observation well some 40 meters from the seawall, the highest on record.

Kyodo News, Dec. 11, 2013: A government panel […] estimated that the utility will not be able to fully address the risks of water leaks by the end of fiscal 2020. […] “If measures are taken smoothly, a large part of the risks (posed by leaks from tanks) will be reduced around the end of fiscal 2020, but the amount of toxic water could surpass the tank storage capacity depending on the situation…and risks associated with keeping a large amount of tritium-water will remain,” the report said.

Estimate of Consequences from the Fukushima Disaster, Nordic PSA Conference (nuclear utilities in Finland and Sweden), September 2011: Some estimates of contamination of ocean waters were performed […] More than 1.1e17 Bq [110 quadrillion becquerels] of Cs137 in total is estimated to have been released into the ocean. With respect to bio-accumulation and weighting factors for fish and other sea fauna a long-term cycle can be expected and high potential for marine life, sea-birds and human health effects through ingestion over generations.

Sentiments of US District Judge, Jed S. Rakoff – We Need More Judges Like This One!

I was reading some information about the financial crisis in this country (USA), and ran across a paper written by US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff.  If we had more Judges with the mind of this one, we would not be in nearly as bad a shape as we are in.  I have not yet figured out how the Judges justify allowing foreclosures, when they know for a fact that the Banks and their attorneys are creating fraudulent documents, committing perjury in their Courtrooms, and are breaking so many laws, that it has become the norm…  

Read what Honorable Judge Jed S. Rakoff says:  http://www.ft.com/cms/cb1e43f2-4be6-11e3-8203-00144feabdc0.pdf

11/12/13
Why Have No High Level Executives Been Prosecuted In Connection With The Financial Crisis?
by Jed S. Rakoff
(U.S. District Judge)

Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope.

Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a “bubble,” of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever-more-esoteric financial instruments, the fundamental weaknesses of which were intentionally obscured?

If it was the former – if the recession was due, at worst, to a lack of caution – then the criminal law has no role to play in the aftermath. For, in all but a few circumstances (not here relevant), the fierce and fiery weapon called criminal prosecution is directed at intentional misconduct, and nothing less. If the Great Recession was in no part the handiwork of intentionally fraudulent practices by high-level executives, then to prosecute such executives criminally would be “scapegoating” of the most shallow and despicable kind.

But if, by contrast, the Great Recession was in material part the product of intentional fraud, the failure to prosecute those responsible must be judged one of the more egregious failures of the criminal justice system in many years.Indeed, it would stand in striking contrast to the increased success that federal prosecutors have had over the past 50 years or so in bringing to justice even the highest level figures who orchestrated mammoth frauds. Thus, in the 1970’s, in the aftermath of the “junk bond” bubble that, in many ways, was a precursor of the more recent bubble in mortgage-backed securities, the progenitors of the fraud were all successfully prosecuted, right up to Michael Milken. Again, in the 1980’s, the so-called savings-and-loan crisis, which again had some eerie parallels to more recent events, resulted in the successful criminal prosecution of more than 800 individuals, right up to Charles Keating. And, again, the widespread accounting frauds of the 1990’s, most vividly represented by Enron and WorldCom, led directly to the successful prosecution of such previously respected C.E.O.’s as Jeffrey Skilling and Bernie Ebbers.

In striking contrast with these past prosecutions, not a single high level executive has been successfully prosecuted in  connection with the recent financial crisis, and given the fact that most of the relevant criminal provisions are governed by a five-year statute of limitations, it appears very likely that none will be. It may not be too soon, therefore, to ask why.

One possibility, already mentioned, is that no fraud was committed. This possibility should not be  discounted. Every case is different, and I, for one, have no opinion as to whether criminal fraud was committed in any given instance.

 But the stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in  accountability, but also in ethical behavior. As the Commission found, the signs of fraud were everywhere to be seen, with the number of reports of suspected mortgage fraud rising 20-fold between 1998 and 2005 and then doubling again in the next four years. As early as 2004, FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker, was publicly warning of the “pervasive problem” of mortgage fraud, driven by the voracious demand for mortgagebacked securities. Similar warnings, many from within the financial community, were disregarded, not because they were  viewed as inaccurate, but because, as one high level banker put it, “A decision was made that ‘We’re going to have to hold our nose and start buying the product if we want to stay in business.’”

Without multiplying examples, the point is that, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the prevailing view of many government officials (as well as others) was that the crisis was in material respects the product of intentional fraud. In a nutshell, the fraud, they argued, was a simple one. Subprime mortgages, i.e., mortgages of dubious creditworthiness, increasingly provided the sole collateral for highly-leveraged securities that were marketed as triple-A, i.e., of very low risk. How could this transformation of a sow’s ear into a silk purse be accomplished unless someone dissembled along the way?

While officials of the Department of Justice have been more circumspect in describing the roots of the financial crisis than have the various commissions of inquiry and other government agencies, I have seen nothing to indicate their disagreement with the widespread conclusion that fraud at every level permeated the bubble in mortgage-backed securities. Rather, their position has been to excuse their failure to prosecute high level individuals for fraud in connection with the financial crisis on one or more of three grounds:

First, they have argued that proving fraudulent intent on the part of the high level management of the banks and companies involved has proved difficult. It is undoubtedly true that the ranks of top management were several levels removed from those who were putting together the collateralized debt obligations and other securities offerings that were based on dubious mortgages; and the people generating the mortgages themselves were often at other companies and thus even further removed. And I want to stress again that I have no opinion as to whether any given top executive had knowledge of the dubious nature of the underlying mortgages, let alone fraudulent intent. But what I do find surprising is that the Department of Justice should view the proving of intent as so difficult in this context. Who, for example, were generating the so-called “suspicious activity” reports of mortgage fraud that, as mentioned, increased so hugely in the years leading up to the crisis? Why, the banks themselves. A top level banker, one might argue, confronted with increasing evidence from his own and other banks that mortgage fraud was increasing, might have inquired as to why his bank’s mortgage-based securities continued to receive triple-A ratings?  And if, despite these and other reports of suspicious activity, the executive failed to make such inquiries, might it be because he did not want to know what such inquiries would reveal?  

This, of course, is what is known in the law as “willful blindness” or “conscious disregard.” It is a well-established basis on which federal prosecutors have asked juries to infer intent, in cases involving complexities, such as accounting treatments, at least as esoteric as those involved in the events leading up to the financial crisis. And while some federal courts have occasionally expressed qualifications about the use of the willful blindness approach to prove intent, the Supreme Court has consistently approved it. As that Court stated most recently in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S.Ct. 2060, 2068 (2011), “The doctrine of willful blindness is well established in criminal law. Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances.” Thus, the Department’s claim that proving intent in the financial crisis context is particularly difficult may strike some as doubtful.

Second, and even weaker, the Department of Justice has sometimes argued that, because the institutions to whom mortgagebacked securities were sold were themselves sophisticated investors, it might be difficult to prove reliance. Thus, in  defending the failure to prosecute high level executives for frauds arising from the sale of mortgage-backed securities, the then head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, told PBS that “in a criminal case … I have to prove not only that you made a false statement but that you intended to commit a crime, and also that the other side of the transaction relied on what you were saying. And frankly, in many of the securitizations and the kinds of transactions we’re talking about, in reality you had very sophisticated counterparties on both sides. And so even though one side may have said something was dark blue when really we can say it was sky blue, the other side of the transaction, the other sophisticated party, wasn’t relying at all on the description of the color.”

Actually, given the fact that these securities were bought and sold at lightning speed, it is by no means obvious that even a sophisticated counterparty would have detected the problems with the arcane, convoluted mortgage-backed derivatives they were being asked to purchase. But there is a more fundamental problem with the above-quoted statement from the former head of the Criminal Division, which is that it totally misstates the law.  In actuality, in a criminal fraud case the Government is never required to prove reliance, ever. The reason, of course, is that would give a crooked seller a license to lie whenever he was  dealing with a sophisticated counterparty.  The law, however, says that society is harmed when a seller purposely lies about a material fact, even if the immediate purchaser does not rely on that particular fact, because such misrepresentations create problems for the market as a whole. And surely there never was a situation in which the sale of dubious mortgage-backed securities created more of a huge problem for the marketplace, and society as a whole, than in the recent financial crisis.

The third reason the Department has sometimes given for not bringing these prosecutions is that to do so would itself harm the economy. Thus, Attorney General Holder himself told Congress that “it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute – if we do bring a criminal charge – it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” To a federal judge, who takes an oath to apply the law equally to rich and to poor, this excuse — sometimes labeled the “too big to jail” excuse – is disturbing, frankly, in what it says about the
Department’s apparent disregard for equality under the law.

In fairness, however, Mr. Holder was referring to the prosecution of financial institutions, rather than their
C.E.O.’s. But if we are talking about prosecuting individuals, the excuse becomes entirely irrelevant; for no one that I know of has ever contended that a big financial institution would collapse if one or more of its high level executives were prosecuted, as opposed to the institution itself.

Without multiplying examples further, my point is that the Department of Justice has never taken the position that all the top executives involved in the events leading up to the financial crisis were innocent, but rather has offered one or another excuse for not criminally prosecuting them – excuses that, on inspection, appear unconvincing. So, you might ask, what’s really going on here? I don’t claim to have any inside information about the real reasons why no such prosecutions have been brought, but I take the liberty of offering some speculations, for your consideration or amusement as the case may be.

At the outset, however, let me say that I totally discount the argument sometimes made that no such prosecutions have been brought because the top prosecutors were often people who previously represented the financial institutions in question and/or were people who expected to be representing such
institutions in the future: the so-called “revolving door.” In my experience, every federal prosecutor, at every level, is seeking to make a name for him-or-herself, and the best way to do that is by prosecuting some high level person. While companies that are indicted almost always settle, individual defendants whose careers are at stake will often go to trial. And if the Government wins such a trial, as it usually does, the prosecutor’s reputation is made.My point is that whatever small influence the “revolving door” may have in discouraging certain white-collar prosecutions is more than offset, at least in the case of prosecuting high-level individuals, by the career-making benefits such prosecutions confer on the successful prosecutor.  So, one asks again, why haven’t we seen such prosecutions growing out of the financial crisis? I offer, by way of speculation, three influences that I think, along with others, have had the effect of limiting such prosecutions.

First, the prosecutors had other priorities. Some of these were completely understandable. For example, prior to 2001, the FBI had more than 1,000 agents assigned to investigating financial frauds, but after 9/11 many of these agents were shifted to anti-terrorism work. Who can argue with that?  Eventually, it is true, new agents were hired for some of the vacated spots in fraud detection; but this is not a form of detection easily learned and recent budget limitations have only exacerbated the problem.

Of course, the FBI is not the primary investigator of fraud in the sale of mortgage-backed securities; that responsibility lies mostly with the S.E.C. But at the very time the financial crisis was breaking, the S.E.C. was trying to deflect criticism from its failure to detect the Madoff fraud, and this led it to concentrate on other Ponzi-like schemes, which for awhile were, along with accounting frauds, its chief focus. More recently, the S.E.C. has been hard hit by budget limitations, and this has not only made it more difficult to assign the kind of manpower the kinds of frauds we are talking about require, but also has led S.E.C. enforcement to focus on the smaller, easily resolved cases that will beef up their statistics when they go to Congress begging for money.

As for the Department of Justice proper, a decision was made around 2009 to spread the investigation of these financial fraud cases among numerous U.S. Attorney’s Offices, many of which had little or no prior experience in investigating and prosecuting sophisticated financial frauds. At the same time, the U.S. Attorney’s Office with the greatest expertise in these kinds of cases, the Southern District of New York, was just embarking on its prosecution of insider trading cases arising from the Rajaratnam tapes, which soon proved a gold mine of good cases that absorbed a huge amount of the attention of the securities fraud unit of that office. While I want to stress again that I have no inside information, as a former chief of that unit I would venture to guess that the cases involving the financial crisis were parceled out to Assistants who also had insider trading cases. Which do you think an Assistant would devote most of her attention to:  an insider trading case that was already nearly ready to go to indictment and that might lead to a highvisibility trial, or a financial crisis case that was just getting started, would take years to complete, and had no guarantee of even leading to an indictment? Of course, she would put her energy into the insider trading case, and if she was lucky, it would go to trial, she would win, and she would then take a job with a large law firm. And in the process, the financial fraud case would get lost in the shuffle.

Alternative priorities, in short, is, I submit, one of the reasons the financial fraud cases were not brought, especially cases against high level individuals that would take many years, many investigators, and a great deal of expertise to investigate.  But a second, and less salutary, reason for not bringing such cases is the Government’s own involvement in the underlying circumstances that led to the financial crisis.

On the one hand, the government, writ large, had a hand in creating the conditions that encouraged the approval of dubious mortgages. It was the government, in the form of Congress, that repealed Glass-Steagall, thus allowing certain banks that had previously viewed mortgages as a source of interest income to become instead deeply involved in securitizing pools of mortgages in order to obtain the much greater profits available from trading. It was the government, in the form of both the executive and the legislature, that encouraged deregulation, thus weakening the power and oversight not only of the S.E.C. but also of such diverse banking overseers as the O.T.S. and the O.C.C. It was the government, in the form of the Fed, that kept interest rates low in part to encourage mortgages. It was the government, in the form of the executive, that strongly encouraged banks to make loans to low-income persons who might have previously been regarded as too risky to warrant a mortgage. It was the government, in the form of the government-sponsored entities known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that helped create the fora-time insatiable market for mortgage-backed securities. And it was the government, pretty much across the board, that acquiesced in the ever greater tendency not to require meaningful documentation as a condition of obtaining a mortgage, often preempting in this regard state regulations designed to assure greater mortgage quality and a borrower’s ability to repay.

The result of all this was the mortgages that later became known as “liars’ loans.” They were increasingly risky; but what did the banks care, since they were making their money from the securitizations; and what did the government care, since they  were helping to boom the economy and helping voters to realize their dream of owning a home.

Moreover, the government was also deeply enmeshed in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It was the government that proposed the shotgun marriages of Bank of America with Merrill Lynch, of J.P. Morgan with Bear Stearns, etc. If, in the process, mistakes were made and liabilities not disclosed, was it not partly the government’s fault?

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not alleging that the Government knowingly participated in any of the fraudulent practices alleged by the Financial Inquiry Crisis Commission and others. But what I am suggesting is that the Government was deeply involved, from beginning to end, in helping create the conditions that could lead to such fraud, and that this would give a prudent prosecutor pause in deciding whether to indict a C.E.O. who might, with some justice, claim that he was only doing what he fairly believed the Government wanted him to do.

 The final factor I would mention is both the most subtle and the most systemic of the three, and arguably the most important, and it is the shift that has occurred over the past 30 years or more from focusing on prosecuting high-level individuals to focusing on prosecuting companies and other institutions. It is true that prosecutors have brought criminal charges against companies for well over a hundred years, but, until relatively recently, such prosecutions were the exception, and prosecutions of companies without simultaneous prosecutions of their managerial agents were even rarer. The reasons were obvious. Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent.   Moreover, under the law of most U.S. jurisdictions, a company cannot be criminally liable unless at least one managerial agent has committed the crime in question; so why not prosecute the agent who actually committed the crime?

 In recent decades, however, prosecutors have been increasingly attracted to prosecuting companies, often even without indicting a single individual. This shift has often been rationalized as part of an attempt to transform “corporate cultures,” so as to prevent future such crimes; and, as a result, it has taken the form of “deferred prosecution agreements” or even “non-prosecution agreements,” in which the company, under threat of criminal prosecution, agrees to take various prophylactic measures to prevent future wrongdoing. But in practice, I suggest, it has led to some lax and dubious behavior on the part of prosecutors, with deleterious results.    

If you are a prosecutor attempting to discover the individuals responsible for an apparent financial fraud, you go about your business in much the same way you go after mobsters or drug kingpins: you start at the bottom and, over many months or years, slowly work your way up. Specifically, you start by “flipping” some lower level participant in the fraud whom you can show was directly responsible for making one or more false material misrepresentations but who is willing to cooperate in order to reduce his sentence, and – aided by the substantial prison penalties now available in white collar cases – you go up the ladder. For a detailed example of how this works, I recommend Kurt Eichenwald’s well-known book The Informant, which describes how FBI agents, over a period of three years, uncovered the huge price-fixing conspiracy involving high-level executives at Archer Daniels, all of whom were successfully prosecuted.

But if your priority is prosecuting the company, a different scenario takes place. Early in the investigation, you invite in counsel to the company and explain to him or her why you suspect fraud. He or she responds by assuring you that the company wants to cooperate and do the right thing, and to that end the company has hired a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, now a partner at a respected law firm, to do an internal investigation. The company’s counsel asks you to defer your investigation until the company’s own internal investigation is completed, on the condition that the company will share its results with you. In order to save time and resources, you agree. Six months later the company’s counsel returns, with a detailed report showing that mistakes were made but that the company is now intent on correcting them. You and the company then agree that the company will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement that couples some immediate fines with the imposition of expensive but internal prophylactic measures. For all practical purposes the case is now over. You are happy because you believe that you have helped prevent future crimes; the company is happy because it has avoided a devastating indictment; and perhaps the happiest of all are the executives, or former executives, who actually committed the underlying misconduct, for they are left untouched. 

I suggest that this is not the best way to proceed. Although it is supposedly justified in terms of preventing future crimes, I suggest that the future deterrent value of successfully prosecuting individuals far outweighs the prophylactic benefits of imposing internal compliance measures that are often little more than window-dressing. Just going after the company is also both technically and morally suspect. It is technically suspect because, under the law, you should not indict or threaten to indict a company unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt  that some managerial agent of the company committed the alleged crime; and if you can prove that, why not indict the manager?  And from a moral standpoint, punishing a company and its many innocent employees and shareholders for the crimes committed by some unprosecuted individuals seems contrary to elementary notions of moral responsibility.

These criticisms take on special relevance, however, in the instance of investigations growing out of the financial crisis, because, as noted, the Department of Justice’s position, until at least very, very recently, is that going after the suspect institutions poses too great a risk to the nation’s economic recovery. So you don’t go after the companies, at least not criminally, because they are too big to jail; and you don’t go after the individuals, because that would involve the kind of years-long investigations that you no longer have the experience or the resources to pursue.

In conclusion, I want to stress again that I have no idea whether the financial crisis that is still causing so many of us so much pain and despondency was the product, in whole or in part, of fraudulent misconduct. But if it was — as various governmental authorities have asserted it was –- then, the failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such colossal fraud bespeaks weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed.

Seven Volcanoes, In Six Countries Erupt Within Hours of One Another

nootkabear's avatarJ & J Ranch, Stone Mtn, GA

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/524712/20131125/7-volcanoes-erupt-6-countries-hours-apart.htm

 International Business Times/Science

 7 Volcanoes Erupt in 6 Countries Hours Apart;Is It Another Doomsday Omen?

By Vittorio Hernandez | November 25, 2013 10:02 AM EST

 Saturday, Nov 23, was an explosive day on earth as seven volcanoes erupted hours apart from each other on the same day.

 In Japan, a volcano on Nishino-Shima Island erupted for the first time in 40 years. The eruption resulted in a new island in the Pacific. The Japanese Navy reported that the eruption caused boiling lava to meet sea water that gave rise to plumes of steam and ash.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YZY6kH_RXSU

Reuters

Smoke from an erupting undersea volcano forms a new island off the coast of Nishinoshima in the southern Ogasawara chain of islands.

 Some 7,000 miles from Japan. Mexico’s Colima Volcano created a steam and ash cloud that reached two miles into the sky.

 In Guatemala, Fire Mountain lived up to its…

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THE HISTORY AND DEATH OF MORTGAGE ELECTRONIC REGISTRATION SYSTEMS, INC. ACCORDING TO THE USTPO

Rest In Peace…

Deadly Clear's avatarDeadly Clear

bamboozledFor nearly 20 years, in particular, the last 10 years, the courts, foreclosure defense attorneys, homeowners and politicians have been bamboozled by the blur and use of “MERS” – the service mark for the MERS® eRegistry system owned and operated now by MERSCORP Holdings, Inc.

“MERS” first became the acronym, an abbreviation for the first Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., in 1995. This corporation was registered in Delaware on October 16, 1995. In 1997 Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. registered “MERS” as the service markwith the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for its mortgage loan eRegistry system. This original MERS corporation has long since been eaten up by other entities created by its executives and board of directors to replace it over the past 18 years. Bottom-line: The original Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. is dead and it died in 1998… RIP

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ENENEWS.COM, Oregonian Reports on Fukushima

http://enenews.com/oregon-official-reports-coming-in-of-seafood-with-radioactive-contamination-theyre-kind-of-secretive-they-dont-want-to-give-up-their-sources-concern-about-impact-fukushima

 ENENews.com – Energy News     

Oregon Official: Reports coming in of seafood with radioactive contamination, “They’re kind of secretive, they don’t want to give up their sources” — Locals concerned about impact Fukushima disaster is having on area fish (VIDEO)

Published: November 21st, 2013 at 2:09 pm ET                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       By ENENews       14 comments 

The Oregonian, Nov. 19, 2013: […] A pocket of doubt persists despite reassurances from scientists and federal health regulators that Pacific-caught seafood is safe to eat. Health officials say Fukushima radiation doesn’t pose a public health threat in the United States. That hasn’t stopped lingering concerns. Christina Mireles DeWitt, director of Oregon State’s Seafood Research and Education Center in Astoria, said she’s noticed an uptick in worries recently. She receives about a call a week from concerned residents who’ve relayed second-hand reports of contaminated fish. Their stories aren’t specific, though, and Mireles DeWitt (who still eats seafood) hasn’t pinpointed what’s causing the increased chatter. “They’re kind of secretive,” she said. “They don’t want to give up their sources.” […] 

The Oregonian, Nov. 19, 2013: Fukushima radiation in Oregon fish; Andy Norris is concerned about the impact the Fukushima nuclear disaster is having on local fish — Oregon Filmmaker Andy Norris: […] We’re pooling resources, we’re buying a community Geiger counter […] This is a huge nuclear accident. It’s not done […] 400 tons of radioactive water is being dumped into the Pacific each day […] We think it’s prudent to be doing some testing […] It’s not going to go away soon. It’s still coming over […] This is going to go on for years, if not decades. […] It’s a very sensible idea to buy this community Geiger counter […] 

Reports of Fukushima contamination in albacore tuna off Oregon coast: More US tuna contaminated — Study: Entire food web “including humans” may be affected as Fukushima radionuclides spread to West Coast 

« Conservative Radio Host: Fukushima could be going on for centuries — Nobody knows how deep fuel went after melting — It’s sad people not paying attention, busy watching TV and football — Interviews Arnie Gundersen (AUDIO)    Tepco: Plutonium is in Unit 4 fuel, it can be leaking out from holes and cracks in rods — Former Fukushima Engineer: State of plant is “hopeless”; Unit 4 vulnerable, “very dangerous” » 

Related Posts

Nuclear Expert: Fukushima contamination that will soon hit U.S. has people very concerned, and I think rightly so — Gov’t should be regularly monitoring seafood, seawater (VIDEO) September 5, 2013 

TV: Physicians in California concerned about fish with Fukushima contamination — I’m eating more fruits and vegetables to fight cell damage from the radiation (VIDEO) October 11, 2013 

Gundersen: Radioactive plume to impact West Coast in a year — Not going away after it hits… likely to only get stronger — Fukushima will keep releasing contamination for years to come — Must demand officials test fish and make data public (AUDIO) August 27, 2013 

National Geopraphic: Fears are mounting that Fukushima radiation could lead to dangerous contamination levels in seafood from Pacific — At least for now fish are not glowing so ‘eat up’! September 12, 2013 

FDA “paying attention to the leaks” at Fukushima — “Do not worry about radioactive fish” — Will test seafood “as needed” August 11, 2013 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but “— I’m eating more fruits and vegetables to fight cell damage from the radiation”;  “At least for now fish are not glowing so ‘eat up’!”; “Do not worry about radioactive fish” — Will test seafood “as needed””  IS BULLSHIT!!! 

These responses to radiation are not acceptable.  Hell, I tell you what, yall eat the radiated vegetables and fruits in California, and yall go ahead and eat the fish.  I will see yall over on the other side.  Looks like the China Syndrome to me……

More Cities Consider Eminent Domain to Halt Foreclosures

Ten thumbs up from Stone Mountain, a step at taking the country back, at long last!

Deadly Clear's avatarDeadly Clear

Save our Homes Walk LogoThe failure of the U.S. government to prosecute those who were the masterminds behind the NTMs (nontraditional mortgages) and subprime loan debacle, that more likely appear to have been an intentional Ponzi-like scam, makes Eminent Domain a plausible solution for relief. If handled properly Eminent Domain may actually save homes and families – not to mention saving lives and local governments that foolishly invested in unregulated and rigged derivatives and securities.

Do the math.  Hypothetical figure (conservative): $900 month payments X 67 million MERS mortgages X 12 months (1 yr.) = $723,600,000,000 new revenue stream annually – and this figure is conservative… it’s likely 2-3 times higher and this is JUST MERS.

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Jeff Barnes, Esq. On the Ball!

http://foreclosuredefensenationwide.com/?p=533

US BANK ADMITS, IN WRITING FROM THEIR CORPORATE OFFICE, THAT THE BORROWER IS A PARTY TO AN MBS TRANSACTION; THAT SECURITIZATION TRUSTEES ARE NOT INVOLVED IN THE FORECLOSURE PROCESS; HAVE NO ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE OF WHEN A LOAN HAS DEFAULTED; THAT THE “TRUE BENEFICIAL OWNERS” OF A SECURITIZED MORTGAGE ARE THE INVESTORS IN THE MBS; AND THAT THE GOAL OF A SERVICER IS TO “MAXIMIZE THE RETURN TO INVESTORS”                                                                                                                                                                                                 November 6, 2013

 We have been provided with a copy of U.S. Bank Global Corporate Trust Services’ “Role of the Corporate Trustee” brochure which makes certain incredible admissions, several of which squarely disprove and nullify the holdings of various courts around the country which have taken the position that the borrower “is not a party to” the securitization and is thus not entitled to discovery or challenges to the mortgage loan transfer process. The brochure accompanied a letter from US Bank to one of our clients which states: “Your account is governed by your loan documents and the Trust’s governing documents”, which admission clearly demonstrates that the borrower’s loan is directly related to documents governing whatever securitized mortgage loan trust the loan has allegedly been transferred to. This brochure proves that Courts which have held to the contrary are wrong on the facts. 

The first heading of the brochure is styled “Distinct Party Roles”. The first sentence of this heading states: “Parties involved in a MBS transaction include the borrower, the originator, the servicer and the trustee, each with their own distinct roles, responsibilities and limitations.” MBS is defined at the beginning of the brochure as the sale of “Mortgage Backed Securities in the capital markets”. The fourth page of the brochure also identifies the “Parties to a Mortgage Backed Securities Transaction”, with the first being the “Borrower”, followed by the Investment Bank/Sponsor, the Investor, the Originator, the Servicer, the Trust (referred to “generally as a special purpose entity, such as a Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit (REMIC)”), and the Trustee (stating that “the trustee does not have an economic or beneficial interest in the loans”). 

The second page sets forth that U.S. Bank, as Trustee, “does not have any discretion or authority in the foreclosure process.” If this is true, how can U.S. Bank as Trustee be the Plaintiff in judicial foreclosures or the foreclosing party in non-judicial foreclosures if it has “no authority in the foreclosure process”? 

The second page also states: “All trustees for MBS transactions, including U.S. Bank, have no advance knowledge of when a mortgage loan has defaulted.” Really? So when, for example, MERS assigns, in 2011, a loan to a 2004 Trust where the loan has been in default since 2008, no MBS “trustee” bank (and note that it says “All” trustees) do not know that a loan coming into the trust is in default? The trust just blindly accepts loans which may or may not be in default without any advanced due diligence? Right. Sure. Of course. LOL. 

However, that may be true, because the trustee banks do not want to know, for then they can take advantage of the numerous insurances, credit default swaps, reserve pools, etc. set up to pay the trust when loans are in default, as discussed below. 

The same page states that “Any action taken by the servicer must maximize the return on the investment made by the ‘beneficial owners of the trust’ — the investors.” The fourth page of the brochure states that the investors are “the true beneficial owners of the mortgages”, and the third page of the brochure states “Whether the servicer pursues a foreclosure or considers a modification of the loan, the goal is still to maximize the return to investors” (who, again, are the true beneficial owners of the mortgage loans). 

This is a critical admission in terms of what happens when a loan is securitized. The borrower initiated a mortgage loan with a regulated mortgage banking institution, which is subject to mortgage banking rules, regulations, and conditions, with the obligation evidenced by the loan documents being one of simple loaning of money and repayment, period. Once a loan is sold off into a securitization, the homeowner is no longer dealing with a regulated mortgage banking institution, but with an unregulated private equity investor which is under no obligation to act in the best interest to maintain the loan relationship, but to “maximize the return”. This, as we know, almost always involves foreclosure and denial of a loan mod, as a foreclosure (a) results in the acquisition of a tangible asset (the property); and (b) permits the trust to take advantage of reserve pools, credit default swaps, first loss reserves, and other insurances to reap even more monies in connection with the claimed “default” (with no right of setoff as to the value of the property against any such insurance claims), and in a situation where the same risk was permitted to be underwritten many times over, as there was no corresponding legislation or regulation which precluded a MBS insurer (such as AIG, MGIC, etc.) from writing a policy on the same risk more than once. 

As those of you know who have had Bloomberg reports done on securitized loans, the screens show loans which have been placed into many tranches (we saw one where the same loan was collateralized in 41 separate tranches, each of which corresponded to a different class of MBS), and with each class of MBS having its own insurance, the “trust” could make 41 separate insurance claims AND foreclose on the house as well! Talk about “maximizing return for the investor”! What has happened is that the securitization parties have unilaterally changed the entire nature of the mortgage loan contract without any prior notice to or approval from the borrower. 

There is no language in any Note or Mortgage document (DOT, Security Deed, or Mortgage) by which the borrower is put on notice that the entire nature of the mortgage loan contract and the other contracting party may be unilaterally changed from a loan with a regulated mortgage lender to an “investment” contract with a private equity investor. This, in our business, is called “fraud by omission” for purposes of inducing someone to sign a contract, with material nondisclosure of matters which the borrower had to have to make the proper decision as to whether to sign the contract or not. 

U.S. Bank has now confirmed, in writing from its own corporate offices in St. Paul, Minnesota, so much of what we have been arguing for years. This brochure should be filed in every securitization case for discovery purposes and opposing summary judgments or motions to dismiss where the securitized trustee “bank” takes the position that “the borrower is not part of the securitization and thus has no standing to question it.” U. S. Bank has confirmed that the borrower is in fact a party to an MBS transaction, period, and that the mortgage loan is in fact governed, in part, by “the Trust’s governing documents”, which are thus absolutely relevant for discovery purposes. 

Jeff Barnes, Esq.,

http://www.ForeclosureDefenseNationwide.com

Overwhelmed

I have been trying to get the time to post something, anything.  I hate my Blogs to sit without activity, and I appreciate all my followers and readers.  I really do.

I have to be honest with yall.  I have been overwhelmed.  I’ve tried not to be.  I’ve tried to let it all go, and not worry about things.  I failed to do so.  

Between the Banksters, the Globalists, the Feds, ObamaCare Joke, DHS, Cops shooting people all over the place, Cops shooting dogs for wagging their tails, Seven cops beating a dead man.  

Then there is Fukushima, and Foreclosure Hell going 100 mph.  Where does it end?  It don’t, it just gets worse.

So…we do what we can, and this week, I have decided that we will warn others about eating the fish!  Don’t eat seafood and don’t eat the fish for God’s sake, unless it came from the local catfish farm or whatever.

We went to netc.com and purchased our monitoring station, and we are up and running and monitoring for radiation spikes.  At least we are informed, and we are not walking around like sheeple.  

You must realize that our government is not going to talk about Fukushima, no one is talking about it.

http://enenews.com/magazine-the-fukushima-crisis-comes-to-the-u-s-professor-new-and-improved-version-of-the-original-atomic-plague-is-spreading-the-truth-is-so-incomprehensible-its-easier-to-pretend-it-does

I promise, I will try to find time to write every few days.  You promise not to eat seafood…. Please.

 

J&J

“Fed” Up: Ron Paul Says “The Middle Class is Getting Wiped Out”

New post on Livinglies’s Weblog

Fannie and Freddie Demand $6 Billion for Sale of “Faulty Mortgage Bonds”

by Neil Garfield

You read the news on one settlement after another, it sounds like the pound of flesh is being exacted from the culprits again and again. This time the FHFA, as owner of Fannie and Freddie, is going for a settlement with Bank of America for sale of “faulty mortgage bonds.” And most people sit back and think that justice is being done. It isn’t. $6 Billion is window dressing on a liability that is at least 100 times that amount. And stock analysts take comfort that the legal problems for the banks has basically been discounted already. It hasn’t.

For practitioners who defend mortgage foreclosures, you must dig a little deeper. The term “faulty mortgage bonds” is a euphemism. Look at the complaints there filed. When they are filed by agencies it means that after investigation they have arrived at the conclusion that something was. very wrong with the sale of mortgage bonds. That is an administrative finding that concluded there was at least probable cause for finding that the mortgage bonds were defective and potentially were criminal.

So what does “defective” or “faulty” mean? Neither the media nor the press releases from the agencies or the banks tell us what was wrong with the bonds. But if you look at the complaints of the agencies, they tell you what they mean. If you look at the investor lawsuits you see that they are alleging that the notes and mortgages were “unenforceable.” Both the agencies and the investors filed complaints alleging that the mortgage bonds were a farce, sham or in other words, a PONZI Scheme.

Why is that important to foreclosure defense? Digging deeper you will find what I have been reporting on this blog. The investors money was not used to fund the REMIC trusts. The unfunded trusts never had the money to buy or fund the origination of bonds. The notes and mortgages were never sold to the Trusts even though “assignments” were executed and shown in court. The assignments themselves were either backdated or violated the 90 day cutoff that under applicable law (the laws of the State of New York) are VOID and not voidable.

What to do? File Freedom of Information Act requests for the findings, allegations and names of investigators for the agency that were involved in the agency action. Take their deposition. Get documents. Find put what mortgages were looked at and which bond series were involved. Get a list of the mortgages and the bonds that were examined. Get the findings on each mortgage and each mortgage bond. Use the the investor allegations as lender admissions admissions in court — that the notes and mortgages are unenforceable.

There is a disconnect between what is going on at the top of the sham securitization chain and what went on in sham mortgage originations and sham sales of loans. They never happened in the real world, no matter how much paper you throw at it.

And that just doesn’t apply to mortgages in default — it applies to all mortgages, which is why all the mortgages that currently exist, and most of the deeds that show ownership of the property have clouded and probably “defective” and “faulty” titles. It’s clear logic that the government and the banks are seeking to avoid, to wit: that if the way in which the money was raised to fund the loans or purchase the loans were defective, then it follows that there are defects in the chain of title and the money trail that were obviously not disclosed, as per the requirements of TILA and Reg Z.

And when you keep digging in discovery you will find out that your client has some clear remedies to collect the profits and compensation paid to undisclosed recipients arising out of the closing of the “loan.” These are offsets to the amount claimed as due. If the loan was not funded by the Trust, then the false paper trail used by the banks in foreclosure is subject to successful attack. If the loans were in fact funded directly by the trust complying with the REMIC provisions of the Internal Revenue Code, then the payee on the note and the mortgagee on the mortgage would be the trust — or if the loan was actually purchased, the Trust would have issued money to the seller (something that never happened).

And lastly, for now, let us look at the capital structure of these banks. A substantial portion of their capital derives from assets in the form of mortgage bonds. This is the most blatant lie of all of them. No underwriter buys the securities issued by the company seeking financing through an offering to investors. It is an oxymoron. The whole purpose of the underwriter was to create securities that would be appealing to investors. The securities are only issued when you have a buyer for them, and then the investor is the owner of the security — in this case mortgage bonds.

The bonds are not issued to the investment bank as an asset of the investment bank. But they ARE issued to the investment bank in “street name.” That is merely to facilitate trading and delivery of certificates which in most cases in the mortgage bond market don’t exist. The issuance in street name does not mean the banks own the mortgage bonds any more than when you a stock and the title is issued in street name mean that you have loaned or gifted the investment to the investment bank.

If you follow the logic of the investment bank then the deposits of money by depository customers could be claimed as assets — without the required entry in the liabilities section of the balance sheet because every dollar on deposit is a liability to pay those monies on demand, which is why checking accounts are referred to as demand deposits.

Hence the “asset” has been entered on the investment bank balance sheet without the corresponding liability on the other side of their balance sheet. And THAT remains that under cover of Federal Reserve purchase of these bonds from the banks, who don’t own the bonds, the value of the bonds is 100 cents on the dollar and the owner is the bank — a living lies fundamental. When the illusion collapses, the banks are coming down with it. You can only go so far lying to the public and the investment community. Eventually the reality is these banks are underfunded, under capitalized and still being propped up by quantitative easing disguised as the purchase of mortgage bonds at the rate of $85 Billion per month.

We need to be preparing for the collapse of the illusion and get the other financial institutions — 7,000 community and regional banks and credit unions — ready to take on the changes caused by the absence of the so-called major banks who are really fictitious entities without a foundation related to economic reality. The backbone is already available — electronic funds transfer is as available to the smallest bank as it is to the largest. It is an outright lie that we need the TBTF banks. They have failed and cannot recover because of the enormity of the lies they told the world. It’s over.

New Upcoming Fines for JP Morgan and Chase Co.

Mortgage group concerned about payment structures for fines 

http://www.insidecounsel.com/2013/10/08/mortgage-group-concerned-about-payment-structures?t=litigation 

Group says large banks have the option to leverage loans they don’t own in order to settle violations

BY CHRIS DIMARCO

October 8, 2013 • Reprints 

While the Department of Justice (DOJ) and J.P. Morgan and Chase Co. have still yet to reach a settlement to resolve a number of pending probes, investors are concerned that they could be unfairly required to shoulder the burden the banks pay out. 

A group of mortgage bond investors has penned a letter to the DOJ, asking it to prevent any bank from using mortgage-backed security adjustments to pay fines. They did not directly imply that the settlement they were talking about stemmed from the ongoing discussions between JP and the DOJ, but raised concerns surrounding settlements with any major bank. 

The group, the Association of Mortgage Investors (AMI), represents about 25 individuals and controls about $56 billion in assets under its organization. In the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the group’s executive director Chris Katopis says, “Parties sued by the government or third-parties should not be able to settle with assets that they do not own, namely other people’s money.” 

As of last week, J.P. Morgan and the DOJ had yet to come to agreement terms that would end a series of investigations pending for the bank. Settlement figures as high as $11 billion have been kicked around, according to individuals close to the case, although no official word has been made. According to speculation, $7 billion of that total would be paid out in fines, with an additional $4 billion going towards relief for struggling homeowners. 

The Association of Mortgage Investors is said to be posturing proactively because of previous mortgage settlements made this year. In these settlements, banks could receive partial settlement credit if they reduced loan-balances. However, many of the mortgages they reduced balances on were managed by investors, and therefore not technically owned by the banks. 

There has been little news out of the J.P. Morgan talks outside of speculation, and it is not known if the Department of Justice is considering the type of payment structure the AMI is fearful of in their talks.

Radiation Poisoning!

Just Released: Doctors Report Thousands Of Japanese People With Nose Bleeds From Radiation (VIDEO)

Wednesday, October 2, 2013 11:57

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/10/just-released-doctors-report-thousands-of-japaneese-people-with-nose-bleeds-from-radiation-video-2782118.html

(Before It’s News)

There are thousands of people in Japan reporting to be suffering massive and recurring nosebleeds in recent days — Gundersen:

Japanese doctors explain that, “We know our patients have radiation illness” but we are forced to keep it secret (VIDEO)

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Over 3,000 ppl mostly of age under 30 are suffering from recurring massive nosebleeding in Japan
Source: Takahiro Katsumi (Foreign Policy Aide to Senator Tadashi Inuzuka, a member of the House of Councillors of the Japanese National Diet –Source)
Date: Updated Oct. 1, 2013
h/t Anonymous tips

  1. FACT: Over 5,000 ppl were reported of tweeting “nosebleed”（hanaji) over the past two-day period from 9/22-9/23 http://togetter.com/li/567445
  2. FACT: Over 3,000 ppl were reported of tweeting “can’t stop my nosebleed” (hanaji ga tomaranai) during the week of 9/20-9/30 (as of 12am 10/01/2013 JST)http://togetter.com/li/568710
  3. FACT: Over 2,500 ppl were reported of tweeting “I’m nosebleeding” (hanaji ga deta) during the short days of 9/28-9/30 (as of 12 am 10/01/2013 JST)http://togetter.com/li/570016

[…] WHAT YOU CAN DO:

For Japanese Facebook and Twitter users, I’ve been asking for assistance to help spread the survey to as much of the affected people as possible using the list shown above. For users overseas, I would like to ask the following: Help me create a database out of this massive list; Help me find reliable statistics on nosebleeding in general vis-a-vis abnormal nosebleeding; and Help me devise a way to bring in the international civic community’s attention on the matter.

See the complete report here

‘Radioactive Spill’ at Fukushima: Tons seeping into ground; ‘Widespread structural problems’ indicated with tanks — Nitrogen injection for preventing explosions at reactors temporarily halted
http://enenews.com/radioactive-spill-…

Nuclear regulator criticized for ‘red tape’ job
Japan’s nuclear regulator is coming under fire from intellectuals. They’re being criticized for bureaucratic behavior.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority fielded comments on Monday from 6 experts who are studying the crisis in Fukushima. The discussion was a review of the NRA’s first year of operation.

“Fear of contaminated food and radioactivity in the metropolitan area” Takashi Hirose
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/jpnx05/e/7db9b9…

The World Must Take Charge at Fukushima
http://coto2.wordpress.com/2013/09/30…

Dr. Helen Caldicott Talks Bluntly About Fukushima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqz9qD…

CriticalReads:More News Mainstream Media Chooses To Ignore By Josey Wales, Click Here!

Attorney Mark Stopa Shows Guts Confronting Appellate Court Bias

Bias Within the Court System, Blatantly Obvious, But They Refuse to Recuse Themselves

Neil Garfield's avatarLivinglies's Weblog

I have just received a copy of a daring and tempestuous motion for rehearing en banc filed by the winner of the appeal. The homeowner won because of precedent, law and common sense; but the court didn’t like their own decision and certified an absurd question to the Florida Supreme Court. The question was whether the Plaintiff in a foreclosure case needs to have standing at the commencement of the action. Whether it is jurisdictional or not (I think it is clearly jurisdictional) Stopa is both right on the law and right on his challenge to the Court on the grounds of BIAS.

The concurring opinion of the court actually says that the court is ruling for the homeowner because it must — but asserts that it is leading to a result that fails to expedite cases where the outcome of the inevitable foreclosure is never in doubt. In other…

View original post 811 more words

“How Much Time Is Left?” by Karl Denninger

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/09/how-much-time-is-left-2777550.html

 “How Much Time Is Left?”

Friday, September 27, 2013 17:09

(Before It’s News) 

“How Much Time Is Left?”
by Karl Denninger

“There is an old truism: Revolution is a game for the young. It’s true. Look at the people who rose up in the Middle East. Or anywhere else for that matter.  It is rare to find a grizzled old man in the crowd, and women (of any age) are rare too. No, these sorts of things tend to require a fair bit of testosterone or, if you prefer a bit raunchier language, young and full of cum. The same dynamic is why military forces don’t draft 40 or 50 year old men. It’s not, in the world of technology, all about being able to hump a pack with no mechanical assistance, although certainly physical exertion is part of it. No, it’s the same thing – testosterone is an asset. 

So it is with alarm that I am watching this sort of display: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went so far as to call one counterproposal “stupid.” The Senate is set to take up the bill shortly after noon on Friday. The package as currently written would defund ObamaCare while also funding the government past Sept. 30, though Democrats are planning to promptly strip the ObamaCare measure. If it passes the Senate, House Republicans will then have to decide whether to insist on including anti-ObamaCare provisions.” 

Not having a final set of prices yet for Florida’s “Obamacare” choices, I’m somewhat-guessing here since what I have at this point is preliminary. But what I’m seeing is alarming. It appears that if I choose to participate I can have one of these plans for less than my catastrophic plan costs now (which I’m sure will “go away”, although I have yet to be formally notified of that.) 

Here’s the problem: I’m in really good health. I have no conditions and take no medications. Zero. My blood sugar and weight are normal, I don’t smoke and I’m quite active physically. I’m the 25% guy (or less) in my age group (~50) and all I need to do to prove that is walk around any of the public watering holes or other gathering places. So if my price is going down but I will get more than I get now then for someone sicker than me their price is going down a lot. 

Who’s price is going up? The 20ish year old person. The young family. The people who have thus far chosen (wisely, at that) to go without. So once again, as we did to our kids with college “educations” and “student loans”, we’re now doing it again, except this time it’s even worse in that you can’t “opt out” or the goons in government will come and shove a gun up your ass (via the IRS.)

Let’s be clear about this folks: We deserve to be eaten.

Yes, I said eaten.

As in caused to assume room temperature.

Then skinned.

Then slathered in BBQ sauce (to cover the bad taste.)

Then grilled.

And consumed.

And the people who should do it to you?

Your children.

Now granted, that’s harsh. And no, I’m not advocating it, I’m saying we deserve it. The people of this nation have no right to the love and respect of their offspring. None. Quite the contrary, we deserve to treated as food.  We have managed to extract promises that cannot be kept and what’s worse the attempt to do so is guaranteed to essentially enslave our younger generation.

I have for a long time lamented that the younger folks in our country seem to be very unmotivated, striving only to do what they have to in order to get by rather than being innovators and making a true effort to excel. I no longer hold this against them. I understand it. Their response to these abuses is non-violent and cannot be assailed – it is in fact logical.

Let’s me ask you the obvious but damned uncomfortable question: Would you prefer the violent – yet still logical, considering what we’ve done to them – alternative?

We, the older people in this country who not only refused to act over the last two decades of financial fraud and abuse in both the private sector and government but in addition continue to refuse to act to stop it to this very day deserve it.

Even though this attitude and passive refusal by our youth will destroy our nation’s competitiveness, the root cause of it is our pig-headed acts and the demand to write checks we cannot cash, insisting that they cash them instead so we can feast while they starve.

We lose the fundamental right to do that with our offspring when our children reach 18 and no longer have a claim on our assets and earnings power in exchange for their sustenance and protection.  Note that from birth to 18 while the relationship may have an essentially parasitic character to it there is a quid-pro-quo that we return to our kids.  You can argue over whether this is just but not whether it’s necessary, since an infant is physically incapable of survival and growth without outside assistance.

That transition from a power relationship to one of equals, even friends, is one that is supposed to happen over time from birth to emancipation. It is in fact our jobs as parents – our only job – to execute on that.

But we’ve become pigs.

We’re not content to perform that task and discharge our responsibilities. When we discovered that we can’t force our now-18 year olds to mow the lawn any more in exchange for an allowance, we then passed laws that tax them to cover our health care after we chose to be gluttonous jackasses, poisoning our bodies and then demanding the latest, most-expensive medical care that we cannot pay for ourselves. Worse, we let government and the “educational monopoly” design a system that is utterly rapacious and designed to screw our youth through uneconomic options sold to them as the “essential” educational background necessary for success.

Sure, there are exceptions. Some can claim those exceptions personally, but damn few can claim them socially. While you may claim you don’t want to burden your children you still continue to vote for, support and allow government to continue to **** the next door neighbor’s kid to get what you claim you deserve.

And don’t tell me it matters if you’re Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or otherwise. It does not. The fact of the matter is that no government can exist without the consent of the governed and no government can issue debt successfully if the people refuse to labor and thus provide something that creditors can rely on for repayment.

By going on strike en-masse we have the ability to stop all of this stupidity, from top to bottom. But we won’t do it because we are afraid. And in response to that fear, instead of standing up to what we’ve done and accepting that we must take risk in order to right what the wrongs we committed we instead choose to financially ****** and enslave those young adults we brought into this world, as if we bred them to be our slaves from the outset.

If you’re wondering why I believe we deserve to be eaten – or our youth simply shut down and refuse to make their best effort – read the above paragraph as many times as you need to until it sinks in.

‘Nuff said.”

– http://market-ticker.org/

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-much-time-is-left.html

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi’s LOOTING THE PENSION FUNDS

http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926/

// 2013-09-17T18:50:20Z
POLITICS (/POLITICS/)
Looting the Pension Funds
By MATT TAIBBI | Sep 26, 2013 AT 07:00AM

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

Detroit’s Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/detroits-debt-crisis-everything-must-go- 20130620)

Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn’t even know how to react. “She’s Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street,” says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. “Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.”

Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island’s 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone.  A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo’s ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.

What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo’s “tool kit” wasn’t just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation’s Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.

Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.

The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of “proprietary” information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. “When I asked, I was basically hammered,” says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island’s nine-member State Investment Commission. “I couldn’t get any information about the actual costs.”

This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.

Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn’t just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it’s also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budgetdevouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America’s states and cities.

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104)

Not only did these middle-class workers already lose huge chunks of retirement money to huckster financiers in the crash, and not only are they now being asked to take the long-term hit for those years of greed and speculative excess, but in many cases they’re also being forced to sit by and watch helplessly as Gordon Gekko wanna-be’s like Loeb or scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital are put in charge of their retirement savings.

It’s a scam of almost unmatchable balls and cruelty, accomplished with the aid of some singularly spineless politicians. And it hasn’t happened overnight. This has been in the works for decades, and the fighting has been dirty all the way.

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510)

There’s $2.6 trillion in state pension money under management in America, and there are a lot of fingers in that pie. Any attempt to make a neat Aesop narrative about what’s wrong with the system would inevitably be an oversimplification. But in this hugely contentious, often overheated national controversy – which at times has pitted private-sector workers who’ve mostly lost their benefits already against public-sector workers who are merely about to lose them – two key angles have gone largely unreported. Namely: who got us into this mess, and who’s now being paid to get us out of it.

The siege of America’s public-fund money really began nearly 40 years ago, in 1974, when Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. In theory, this sweeping regulatory legislation was designed to protect the retirement money of workers with pension plans. ERISA forces employers to provide information about where pension money is being invested, gives employees the right to sue for breaches of fiduciary duty, and imposes a conservative “prudent man” rule on the managers of retiree funds, dictating that they must make sensible investments and seek to minimize loss. But this landmark worker-protection law left open a major loophole: It didn’t cover public pensions. Some states were balking at federal oversight, and lawmakers, naively perhaps, simply never contemplated the possibility of local governments robbing their own workers.

Politicians quickly learned to take liberties. One common tactic involved illegally borrowing cash from public retirement funds to finance other budget needs. For many state pension funds, a significant percentage of the kitty is built up by the workers themselves, who pitch in as little as one and as much as 10 percent of their income every year. The rest of the fund is made up by contributions from the taxpayer.

In many states, the amount that the state has to kick in every year, the Annual Required Contribution (ARC), is mandated by state law.

Chris Tobe, a former trustee of the Kentucky Retirement Systems who blew the whistle to the SEC on public-fund improprieties in his state and wrote a book called Kentucky Fried Pensions, did a careful study of states and their ARCs. While some states pay 100 percent (or even more) of their required bills, Tobe concluded that in just the past decade, at least 14 states have regularly failed to make their Annual Required Contributions. In 2011, an industry website called 24/7 Wall St. compiled a list of the 10 brokest, most busted public pensions in America. “Eight of those 10 were on my list,” says Tobe.

Among the worst of these offenders are Massachusetts (made just 27 percent of its payments), New Jersey (33 percent, with the teachers’ pension getting just 10 percent of required payments) and Illinois (68 percent). In Kentucky, the state pension fund, the Kentucky Employee Retirement System (KERS), has paid less than 50 percent of its ARCs over the past 10 years, and is now basically butt-broke – the fund is 27 percent funded, which makes bankrupt Detroit, whose city pension is 77 percent full, look like the sultanate of Brunei by comparison.

Here’s what this game comes down to. Politicians run for office, promising to deliver law and order, safe and clean streets, and good schools. Then they get elected, and instead of paying for the cops, garbagemen, teachers and firefighters they only just 10 minutes ago promised voters, they intercept taxpayer money allocated for those workers and blow it on other stuff. It’s the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids’ college fund to buy lap dances. In Rhode Island, some cities have underfunded pensions for decades. In certain years zero required dollars were contributed to the municipal pension fund. “We’d be fine if they had made all of their contributions,” says evidence firefighters union. “Instead, after they took all that money, they’re saying we’re broke. Are you fucking kidding me?”

There’s an arcane but highly disturbing twist to the practice of not paying required contributions into pension funds: The states that engage in this activity may also be committing securities fraud. Why? Because if a city or state hasn’t been making its required contributions, and this hasn’t been made plain to the ratings agencies, then that same city or state is actually concealing what in effect are massive secret loans and is actually far more broke than it is representing to investors when it goes out into the world and borrows money by issuing bonds.

Some states have been caught in the act of doing this, but the penalties have been so meager that the practice can be considered quasisanctioned. For example, in August 2010, the SEC reprimanded the state of New Jersey for serially lying about its failure to make pension ontributions throughout the 2000s. “New Jersey failed to provide certain present and historical financial information regarding its pension funding in bond-disclosure documents,” the SEC wrote, in seemingly grave language. “The state was aware of . . . the potential   effects of the underfunding.” Illinois was similarly reprimanded by the SEC for lying about its failure to make its required pension contributions. But in neither of these cases were the consequences really severe. So far, states get off with no monetary fines at all. “The SEC was mistaken if they think they sent a message to other states,” Tobe says.

But for all of this, state pension funds were more or less in decent shape prior to the financial crisis of 2008. The country, after all, had been in a historic bull market for most of the 1990s and 2000s and politicians who underpaid the ARCs during that time often did so assuming that the good times would never end. In fact, prior to the crash, state pension funds nationwide were cumulatively running a surplus. But then the crash came, and suddenly states everywhere were in a real, no-joke fiscal crisis. Tax revenues went in the crapper, and someone had to take the hit. But who? Cuts to corporate welfare and a rolled-up-newspaper whack of new taxes on the guilty finance sector seemed a good place to start, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, it was then that the legend of pension unsustainability was born, with the help of a pair of unlikely allies.

Most people think of Pew Charitable Trusts as a centrist, nonpartisan organization committed to sanguine policy analysis and agnostic number crunching. It’s an odd reputation for an organization that was the legacy of J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil (the future Sunoco) during its early 20th-century petro-powerhouse days and a kind of australopithecine precursor to a Tea Party leader.

Pew had all the symptoms: an obsession with the New Deal as a threat to free society, a keen appreciation for unreadable Austrian economist F.A. Hayek and a hoggish overuse of the word “freedom.” Pew and his family left nearly $1 billion to a series of trusts, one of which was naturally called the “Freedom Trust,” whose mission was, in part, to combat “the false promises of socialism and a planned economy.”

The Great American Bubble Machine (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405)

Still, for decades Pew trusts engaged in all sorts of worthy endeavors, including everything from polling to press criticism. In 2007, Pew began publishing an annual study called “The Widening Gap,” which aimed to use states’ own data to show the “gap” between present pension-fund levels and future obligations. The study quickly became a leading analysis of the “unfunded liability” question.

In 2011, Pew began to align itself with a figure who was decidedly neither centrist nor nonpartisan: 39-year-old John Arnold, whom CNN/Money described (erroneously) as the “second-youngest self-made billionaire in America,” after Mark Zuckerberg. Though similar in wealth and youth, Arnold presented the stylistic opposite of Zuckerberg’s signature nerd chic: He’s a lipless, eager little jerk with the jug-eared face of a Division III women’s basketball coach, exactly what you’d expect a former Enron commodities trader to look like.

Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room and remembers those tapes of Enron traders cackling about rigging energy prices on “Grandma Millie” and jamming electricity rates “right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour” will have a sense of exactly what Arnold’s work environment was like.

The People vs. Goldman Sachs (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511)

In fact, in the book that the movie was based on, the authors portray Arnold bragging about his minions manipulating energy prices, praising them for “learning how to use the Enron bat to push around the market.” Those comments later earned Arnold visits from federal investigators, who let him get away with claiming he didn’t mean what he said.

As Enron was imploding, Arnold played a footnote role, helping himself to an $8 million bonus while the company’s pension fund was vaporizing. He and other executives were later rebuked by a bankruptcy judge for looting their own company along with other executives.  Public pension funds nationwide, reportedly, lost more than $1.5 billion thanks to their investments in Enron.

In 2002, Arnold started a hedge fund and over the course of the next few years made roughly a $3 billion fortune as the world’s most successful natural-gas trader. But after suffering losses in 2010, Arnold bowed out of hedge-funding to pursue “other interests.” He had created the Arnold Foundation, an organization dedicated, among other things, to reforming the pension system, hiring a Republican lobbyist and former chief of staff to Dick Armey named Denis Calabrese, as well as Dan Liljenquist, a Utah state senator and future Tea Party challenger to Orrin Hatch.

Soon enough, the Arnold Foundation released a curious study on pensions. On the one hand, it admitted that many states had been undercontributing to their pension funds for years. But instead of proposing that states correct the practice, the report concluded that “the way to create a sound, sustainable and fair retirement-savings program is to stop promising a [defined] benefit.”

In 2011, Arnold and Pew found each other. As detailed in a new study by progressive think tank Institute for America’s Future, Arnold and Pew struck up a relationship – and both have since been proselytizing pension reform all over America, including California, Florida, Kansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Montana. Few knew that Pew had a relationship with a right-wing, anti-pension zealot like Arnold. “The centrist reputation of Pew was a key in selling a lot of these ideas,” says Jordan Marks of the National Public Pension Coalition. Later, a Pew report claimed that the national “gap” between pension assets and future liabilities added up to some $757 billion and dryly insisted the shortfall was unbridgeable, minus some combination of “higher contributions from taxpayers and employees, deep benefit cuts and, in some cases, changes in how retirement plans are structured and benefits are distributed.”

What the study didn’t say was that this supposedly massive gap could all be chalked up to the financial crisis, which, of course, had been caused almost entirely by the greed and wide-scale fraud of the financial-services industry – particularly with regard to state pension funds.

A study by noted economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research bore this out. In February 2011, Baker reported that, had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all. He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, but only “insofar as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry’s services.”

In fact, Baker said, had public funds during the crash years simply earned modest returns equal to 30-year Treasury bonds, then publicpension assets would be $850 billion richer than they were two years after the crash. Baker reported that states were short an additional $80 billion over the same period thanks to the fact that post-crash, cash-strapped states had been paying out that much less of their mandatory ARC payments.

So even if Pew’s numbers were right, the “unfunded liability” crisis had nothing to do with the systemic unsustainability of public pensions. Thanks to a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent toxic subprime products crashed the market, these funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers’ benefits were simply too expensive.

In a way, this was a repeat of a shell game with retirement finance that had been going on at the federal level since the Reagan years. The supposed impending collapse of Social Security, which actually should be running a surplus of trillions of dollars, is now repeated as a simple truth. But Social Security wouldn’t be “collapsing” at all had not three decades of presidents continually burgled the cash in the Social Security trust fund to pay for tax cuts, wars and God knows what else. Same with the alleged insolvencies of state pension programs. The money may not be there, but that’s not because the program is unsustainable: It’s because bankers and politicians stole the money.

Still, the public mostly bought the line being sold by Arnold, Pew and other anti-pension figures like the Koch brothers. To most, it didn’t matter who was to blame: What mattered is that the money was gone, and there seemed to be only two possible paths forward. One led to bankruptcy, a real-enough threat that had already ravaged places like Vallejo, California; Jefferson County, Alabama; and, this summer, Detroit. In Rhode Island, the tiny town of Central Falls went bust in 2011, and even after a court-ordered plan lifted the town out of bankruptcy in 2012, the “rescue” left pensions slashed as much as 55 percent. “You had guys who were living off $24,000, and now they’re getting $12,000,” says Day. Though Day and his fellow retirees are still fighting reform, he says other union workers might rather settle than file bankruptcy. Holding up an infamous local-newspaper picture of a retired Central Falls policeman in a praying posture, as though begging not to have his whole pension taken away, Day sighs. “Guys take one look at this picture and that’s it. They’re terrified.”

Such images chilled many public workers into accepting the second path – the kind of pension reform meagerly touted by one-percentfriendly politicians like Gina Raimondo. Anyone could see that “reform” meant giving up cash. But the other parts of these schemes were murkier. Most pension-reform proposals required that states must go after higher returns by seeking out “alternative investments,” which sounds harmless enough. But we are now finding out what that term actually means – and it’s a little north of harmless.

Looting Main Street: How the Nation’s Biggest Banks Are Ripping Us Off (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-mainstreet-20100331)

One of the most garish early experiments in “alternative investments” came in Ohio in the late 1990s, after the Republican-controlled state assembly passed a law loosening restrictions on what kinds of things state funds could invest in. Sometime later, an investigation by the Toledo Blade revealed that the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation had bought into rare-coin funds run by a GOP fundraiser named Thomas Noe. Through Noe, Ohio put $50 million into coins and “other collectibles” – including Beanie Babies.

The scandal had repercussions all over the country, but not what you’d expect. James Drew, one of the reporters who broke the story, notes that a consequence of “Coingate” was that states stopped giving out information about where public money is invested. “If they learned anything, it’s not to stop doing it, but to keep it secret,” says Drew.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-courts-helping-banks-screw-overhomeowners-20101110)

In fact, in recent years more than a dozen states have carved out exemptions for hedge funds to traditional Freedom of Information Act requests, making it impossible in some cases, if not illegal, for workers to find out where their own money has been invested.  The way this works, typically, is simple: A hedge fund will refuse to take a state’s business unless it first provides legal guarantees that information about its investments won’t be disclosed to the public. The ostensible justifications for these outrageous laws are usually that disclosing commercial information about hedge funds would place them at a “competitive disadvantage.”

In 2010, the University of California reinvested its pension fund with a venture-capital group called Sequoia Capital, which in turn is a backer of a firm called Think Finance, whose business is payday lending – a form of short-term, extremely high-interest rate lending that’s basically loan-sharking without the leg-breaking, and is banned in 15 states and D.C. According to American Banker, Think Finance partnered with a Native American tribe to get around state interest-rate caps; someone borrowing $250 in its “plain green loans” program would owe $440 after 16 weeks, for a tidy annual percentage rate of 379 percent. In a more recent case, the pension fund of L.A. County union workers invested in an Embassy Suites hotel that is trying to prevent janitors and other employees from organizing.

California passed a law in 2005 making hedge-fund investments secret.  The American Federation of Teachers this spring released a list of financiers who had been connected with lobbying efforts against defined-benefit plans. Included on that list was hedge-funder Loeb of Third Point Capital, who sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, a group that advocates for an end to these traditional plans for public workers – that is, pensions that promise a guaranteed payout based on one’s salary and years of service. When Rhode Island union rep Reback complained about hiring funds whose managers had anti-labor histories, she was told the state couldn’t make decisions based on political leanings of fund managers. That same month, Rhode Island moved to disinvest its workers’ money from firearms distributors in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Hedge funds have good reason to want to keep their fees hidden: They’re insanely expensive. The typical fee structure for private hedgefund management is a formula called “two and twenty,” meaning the hedge fund collects a two percent fee just for showing up, then gets 20 percent of any profits it earns with your money. Some hedge funds also charge a mysterious third fee, called “fund expenses,” that can run as high as half a percent – Loeb’s Third Point, for instance, charged Rhode Island just more than half a percent for “fund expenses” last year, or about $350,000. Hedge funds will also pass on their trading costs to their clients, a huge additional line item that can come to an extra percent or more and is seldom disclosed. There are even fees states pay for withdrawing from certain hedge funds.

In public finance, hedge funds will sometimes give slight discounts, but the numbers are still enormous. In Rhode Island, over the course of 20 years, Siedle projects that the state will pay $2.1 billion in fees to hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Why is that number interesting? Because it very nearly matches the savings the state will be taking from workers by freezing their Cost of Living Adjustments – $2.3 billion over 20 years.

“That’s some ‘reform,'” says Siedle.  “They pretty much took the COLA and gave it to a bunch of billionaires,” hisses Day, Providence’s retired firefighter union chief.

When asked to respond to criticisms that the savings from COLA freezes could be seen as going directly into the pockets of billionaires, treasurer Raimondo replied that it was “very dangerous to look at fees in a vacuum” and that it’s worth paying more for a safer and more diverse portfolio. She compared hedge funds – inherently high-risk investments whose prospectuses typically contain front-page disclaimers saying things like, WARNING: YOU MAY LOSE EVERYTHING – to snow tires. “Sure, you pay a little more,” she says. “But you’re really happy you have them when the roads are slick.”

Raimondo recently criticized the high-fee structure of hedge funds in the Wall Street Journal and told Rolling Stone that “‘two and twenty’ doesn’t make sense anymore,” although she hired several funds at precisely those fee levels back before she faced public criticism on the issue. She did add that she was monitoring the funds’ performance. “If they underperform, they’re out,” she says.

And underperforming is likely. Even though hedge funds can and sometimes do post incredible numbers in the short-term – Loeb’s Third Point notched a 41 percent gain for Rhode Island in 2010; the following year, it earned -0.54 percent. On Wall Street, people are beginning to clue in to the fact – spikes notwithstanding – that over time, hedge funds basically suck. In 2008, Warren Buffett famously placed a million-dollar bet with the heads of a New York hedge fund called Protégé Partners that the S&P 500 index fund – a neutral bet on the entire stock market, in other words – would outperform a portfolio of five hedge funds hand-picked by the geniuses at Protégé.

Five years later, Buffett’s zero-effort, pin-the-tail-on-the-stock-market portfolio is up 8.69 percent total. Protégé’s numbers are comical in comparison; all those superminds came up with a 0.13 percent increase over five long years, meaning Buffett is beating the hedgies by nearly nine points without lifting a finger.

Union leaders all over the country have started to figure out the perils of hiring a bunch of overpriced Wall Street wizards to manage the public’s money. Among other things, investing with hedge funds is infinitely more expensive than investing with simple index funds. On Wall Street and in the investment world, the management price is measured in something called basis points, a basis point equaling one hundredth of one percent. So a state like Rhode Island, which is paying a two percent fee to hedge funds, is said to be paying an upfront fee of 200 basis points.

How much does it cost to invest public money in a simple index fund? “We’ve paid as little as .875 of a basis point,” says William Atwood, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Investment. “At most, five basis points.”

So at the low end, Atwood is paying 200 times less than the standard two percent hedge-fund fee. As an example, Atwood says, the state of Illinois paid a fee of just $57,000 last year on $550 million of public money they put into an S&P 500 index fund, which, again, is exactly the sort of plain-vanilla investment that Warren Buffett used to publicly kick the ass of Wall Street’s cockiest hedge fund.

The fees aren’t even the only costs of “alternative investments.” Many states have engaged middlemen called “placement agents” to hire hedge funds, and those placement agents – typically people with ties to state investment boards – are themselves paid enormous sums, often in the millions, just to “introduce” hedge funds to politicians holding the checkbook.

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314)

In Kentucky, Tobe and Siedle found that KRS, the state pension funds, had paid a whopping $14 million to placement agents between 2004 and 2009. In Atlanta, a member of the city pension board complained to the SEC that the city had hired a consultant, Larry Gray, who convinced the city pension fund to invest $28 million in a hedge fund he himself owned. Raimondo says she never hired placement agents, but the state did pay a $450,000 consulting fee to a firm called Cliffwater LLC.

Doughty says the endless system of highly paid middlemen reminds him of old slapstick comedies. “It’s like the Three Stooges,” he says.  “When you ask them what happened, they’re all pointing in different directions, like, ‘He did it!'”

How Wall Street Is Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-is-usingthe-bailout-to-stage-a-revolution-20090402)

Even worse, placement agents are also often paid by the alternative investors. In California, the Apollo private-equity firm paid a former CalPERS board member named Alfred Villalobos a staggering $48 million for help in securing investments from state pensions, and Villalobos delivered, helping Apollo receive $3 billion of CalPERS money. Villalobos got indicted in that affair, but only because he’d lied to Apollo about disclosing his fees to CalPERS. Otherwise, despite the fact that this is in every way basically a crude kickback scheme, there’s no law at all against a placement agent taking money from a finance firm. The Government Accountability Office has condemned the practice, but it goes on.

“It’s a huge conflict of interest,” says Siedle. So when you invest your pension money in hedge funds, you might be paying a hundred times the cost or more, you might be underperforming the market, you may be supporting political movements against you, and you often have to pay what effectively is a bribe just for the privilege of hiring your crappy overpaid money manager in the first place. What’s not to like about that? Who could complain?

Once upon a time, local corruption was easy. “It was votes for jobs,” Doughty says with a sigh. A ward would turn out for a councilman, the councilman would come back with jobs from city-budget contracts – that was the deal. What’s going on with public pensions is a more confusing modern version of that local graft. With public budgets carefully scrutinized by everyone from the press to regulators, the black box of pension funds makes it the only public treasure left that’s easy to steal. Politicians quietly borrow millions from these funds by not paying their ARCs, and it’s that money, plus the savings from cuts made to worker benefits in the name of
“emergency” pension reform, that pays for an apparently endless regime of corporate tax breaks and handouts.

A notorious example in Rhode Island is, of course, 38 Studios, the doomed video-game venture of blabbering, Christ-humping ex-Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who received a $75 million loan guarantee from the state at a time when local politicians were pleading poverty. “This whole thing isn’t just about cutting payments to retirees,” says syndicated columnist David Sirota, who authored the Institute for America’s Future study on Arnold and Pew. “It’s about preserving money for corporate welfare.” Their study estimates states spend up to $120 billion a year on offshore tax loopholes and gifts to dingbats like Schilling and other subsidies – more than two and a half times as much as the $46 billion a year Pew says states are short on pension payments.

The bottom line is that the “unfunded liability” crisis is, if not exactly fictional, certainly exaggerated to an outrageous degree. Yes, we live in a new economy and, yes, it may be time to have a discussion about whether certain kinds of public employees should be receiving sizable benefit checks until death. But the idea that these benefit packages are causing the fiscal crises in our states is almost entirely a fabrication crafted by the very people who actually caused the problem. It’s like Voltaire’s maxim about noses having evolved to fit spectacles, so therefore we wear spectacles. In this case, we have an unfunded-pension-liability problem because we’ve been ripping retirees off for decades – but the solution being offered is to rip them off even more.

Everybody following this story should remember what went on in the immediate aftermath of the crash of 2008, when the federal government was so worried about the sanctity of private contracts that it doled out $182 billion in public money to AIG. That bailout guaranteed that firms like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank could be paid off on their bets against a subprime market they themselves helped overheat, and that AIG executives could be paid the huge bonuses they naturally deserved for having run one of the world’s largest corporations into the ground. When asked why the state was paying those bonuses, Obama economic adviser Larry Summers said, “We are a country of law. . . . The government cannot just abrogate contracts.”

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? (http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-sec-covering-up-wall-street-crimes-20110817)

Now, though, states all over the country are claiming they not only need to abrogate legally binding contracts with state workers but also should seize retirement money from widows to finance years of illegal loans, giant fees to billionaires like Dan Loeb and billions in tax breaks to the Curt Schillings of the world. It ain’t right. If someone has to tighten a belt or two, let’s start there. If we’ve still got a problem after squaring those assholes away, that’s something that can be discussed. But asking cops, firefighters and teachers to take the first hit for a crisis caused by reckless pols and thieves on Wall Street is low, even by American standards.

This story is from the October 10th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

I Have Just Read the Biggest Bunch of BullShit, That I Have Read This Year! According to CNN: “Obama heads into State of the Union on ratings uptick”

I cannot believe that “latest in a string of surveys showing Obama’s ratings inching up, including a CNN/ORC poll from late December showing Obama at a 20-month approval high”.

“Improving economic conditions have finally triggered more optimism”. Where has there been improving economic conditions? If anyone knows, please tell me, I would like to experience an improved economic condition. Did anyone else see “Dr. Benjamin Carson’s Amazing Speech at the National Prayer Breakfast with Obama Present” on youtube? Now all of the sudden, the country has miraculously recovered from economic conditions? What about the southern borders, did they get closed up too? And what about Ebola? Not talking about it, and banning the media from mentioning it, did not make it go away!

BullShit! Pure, Plain, Simple BullShit!

From CNN: The Propoganda, that they want everyone to believe can be found here:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/19/politics/obama-popular-state-of-the-union/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+Top+Stories%29

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama heads into Tuesday’s State of the Union address riding the first uptick in his approval ratings in years, but he’ll be speaking to a room full of more Republicans than Democrats for the first time, providing for a new dynamic in the annual ritual.

Fifty percent say they approve of the job Obama’s doing as president, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Monday. That’s the best Obama’s fared since the spring of 2013, and it’s the latest in a string of surveys showing Obama’s ratings inching up, including a CNN/ORC poll from late December showing Obama at a 20-month approval high.

Obama’s State of the Union wades into 2016

Improving economic conditions have finally triggered more optimism in the country, the surveys show, though many Americans still say the nation’s financial state is poor. Even as more people feel the benefits of a resurgent economy, there’s still a persistent sense among Americans that it’s not improving fast enough.

The Washington Post/ABC poll out Monday showed 56% of Americans felt the country was on the wrong track – an improvement from the 70% who felt that way in 2013, but still reflective of a majority who aren’t seeing much to crow about in the economic recovery.

That gloom is part of the reason Democrats fared so poorly in November’s midterm elections – and why Obama’s address on Tuesday will be delivered to the first GOP-majority Congress of Obama’s presidency.

The White House hopes that with improving approval poll numbers will come more unity among Democrats around Obama’s agenda, which aides say can be reduced to three words: middle class economics.

Obama tax plan: Cuts and hikes

“It’s important for us to find every single way that we can to provide some relief for middle class families because as the economy finally after six years gets to the point where people are beginning to feel it, we need to make sure we lean in so that folks have a little bit more money at the end of the week,” said David Simas, the director of Obama’s political office.

That means proposing new tax breaks for married couples where each partner works, increasing the child care tax credit and offering two years of community college free to qualified applicants.

The White House says those kinds of moves will help bolster middle-class Americans who aren’t yet feeling the economic recovery, despite plenty of data indicating the country moving further away from the recession.

But even as Obama finds himself more popular than he has been in months, his agenda appears to be facing its toughest challenge yet with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress.

GOP leaders have already dismissed the White House tax plan as an unserious bid at tax reform, an issue both sides say they want to tackle in the final two years of Obama’s presidency. The President’s aides say they still expect to make progress.

“The State of the Union is an opportunity for the President to lay out his vision, to put forward his proposals. Republicans now in charge of Congress will have an opportunity to put forward their proposals,” Simas said. “This is the beginning of a process and we hope that it’s fruitful.”

Mark Stopa’s “The Erosion of the Judiciary”

Foreclosure Court: The Erosion of the Judiciary                                                                                                   http://www.stayinmyhome.com/foreclosure-court-the-erosion-of-the-judiciary/

Posted on September 2nd, 2013 by Mark Stopa 

I’m a big believer in the justice system.  In fact, that’s part of why I became a lawyer.  I believe in every litigant’s right to obtain a fair hearing and trial before a neutral judge and/or impartial jury.  It sounds cliché, but that’s what I do – help people navigate the judicial system in their time of need. 

In recent months, though, the judiciary in many parts of Florida (not all, but many) has turned into something I don’t recognize.  The change has been so sudden and so extreme that it’s altering the face of the judiciary and hindering that which I hold so dear – the right to fair hearings and due process.  Yes, what I consider the “core” of a fully-functioning judicial system is eroding. 

If you’re a Florida lawyer but you don’t handle foreclosure cases, you likely have no idea what I’m talking about.  After all, outside of foreclosure-world, Florida’s courts are operating like normal, business as usual.  Sure, the down economy has brought some minor changes, but all in all, our courts are functioning in a normal way. 

Foreclosure cases, though, are a totally different animal. 

I was chatting with a colleague the other day, an attorney who doesn’t handle foreclosure lawsuits, and he was shocked as I described the things I see in foreclosure court on a daily basis.  This is a seasoned attorney who was SHOCKED at what I see every day.  That made me realize … I’m not doing a good enough job of explaining the travesties I see every day in foreclosure-world. 

It’s a tough line to toe, frankly.  Bar rules prohibit me from disparaging any particular judge, so it’s sometimes difficult to explain what’s happening in foreclosure court without crossing that line.  In this blog, though, I’m going to toe that line.  Don’t misunderstand – I’m not criticizing anyone in particular.  Rather, my critique – and that’s what I see this as, a constructive critique, coupled with a hope that everyone will realize just how flawed our system has become – is aimed at the entire institution.  My concerns aren’t with any particular judge or any one ruling – they lie with the entire judicial system, the way the entire judiciary is operating right now, at least as it pertains to foreclosure cases. 

I know what you’re thinking.  I’m just a self-interested, foreclosure defense attorney who’s trying to delay foreclosures and let people live for free.  I’m upset because the courts are making that more difficult.  Right?

Before you blow off my concerns in that manner, you tell me.  Are my concerns legitimate?  Is this how a judicial system should operate?  You tell me … 

As a foreclosure defense lawyer, I’ve seen pro se homeowners attend hearings in their cases and not be allowed to speak.  Not one word.  It wasn’t that the judge didn’t hear the homeowner or didn’t realize he/she was present, either – the homeowner asked the judge to speak at a duly-noticed hearing and was not permitted to do so.  Homeowner loses, yet couldn’t say one word.  Isolated incident, you say?  I’ve personally seen it more than once. 

Not being permitted to speak has not been limited to pro se homeowners.  I have personally been threatened with criminal contempt – criminal contempt – for moving to disqualify a judge after striking my defenses without letting me say one word about those defenses.  Your defenses are stricken, you can’t talk, and if you complain about it, I’ll throw you in jail. 

In many parts of Florida, attorneys are not permitted to attend foreclosure hearings by phone – regardless of how insignificant or short the hearing may be.  Never mind that the Florida Supreme Court created a rule of judicial administration which requires phone appearances be permitted for hearings that are 15 minutes or less absent “good cause” – in many parts of Florida, attendance by phone is simply not permitted. 

I’ve heard some justify this procedure by explaining how it’s difficult to deal with phone appearances in foreclosure cases.  Really?  How is it any more difficult than in other types of cases?  Frankly, I can’t help but wonder if the prohibition on phone appearances is designed to make it harder for defense lawyers to appear in cases for homeowners, enabling the courts to push through those cases faster.  (Prohibiting phone appearances obviously makes it harder and more expensive to attend hearings, often making the difference in a homeowner’s ability to afford counsel.) 

That’s an absurd proposition, though, right?  Why would our courts care how quickly foreclosure lawsuits are litigated?  Judges are neutral arbiters – they don’t care how quickly the cases are adjudicated.  Do they? 

The answer to that question is at the heart of the problem.  In recent months, the Florida legislature has been putting immense pressure on Florida judges to clear the backlog of foreclosure lawsuits.  How much pressure?  Well, the legislature controls the amount of funding that goes to our courts – funding that is needed to retain new judges, senior judges, court staff, and clerks (basically, the funding necessary to keep all judges and JAs from being totally overwhelmed).  Unfortunately, the legislature has been giving these judges an ultimatum, kind of like parents do to their children regarding allowance.  Basically, it works like this … “if you don’t finish these foreclosure cases, we won’t give you more funding.”  As such, the legislature holds the judiciary hostage … if the judiciary doesn’t clear cases, then the legislature doesn’t give the judiciary the funding necessary to manage the many thousands of foreclosure lawsuits pending before it. 

Perhaps worse yet, and to my sheer disgust, I’m told the legislature recently cut the pay of Florida judges (for the first time in years), and the clear understanding was that it was done as a way to punish/blame the judges for not clearing up the backlog of foreclosure cases faster.  “You won’t enter judgments fast enough for our liking … we’ll cut your pay.” 

(The pay of Florida judges is public record, right?  Why is nobody talking about this?) 

The judicial system shouldn’t operate this way.  We all learned it in elementary school, how the three branches of government exist as “separate but equal” branches of government, employing a system of “checks and balances” to ensure a fully-functioning government.  But that’s not what’s happening right now, certainly not in foreclosure court.  In foreclosure-world, the legislature is king. 

You might think this is conjecture and speculation on my part.  It’s not.  I can’t go a week without hearing how the legislature is forcing judges to move cases.  Judges discuss it openly in open court, and not just to me – to everyone.  As a result of this dynamic – judges wanting to move cases – I see all sorts of crazy things I’d never see in any other area of law. 

I’ve mentioned the homeowners who can’t speak, the threats of incarcertaion, and the prohibition on phone appearances, but let’s get to some more egregious concerns. 

Judges sua sponte set trials in foreclosure cases (without a Notice of Trial having been filed, without a CMC or pretrial conference, and without discussing/clearing the date with an counsel).  This is now routine, virtually everywhere in the state. 

Judges sua sponte set trials in foreclosure cases where a motion to dismiss is outstanding and the defendant has not filed an answer. 

Judges sua sponte set trials with less than 30 days’ notice (such that, as defense counsel, you randomly receive a trial Order in the mail, reflecting you have a trial in 2 weeks).

 The sua sponte setting of trials dominates the landscape of foreclosure-world.  Banks often don’t want trials in foreclosure cases, but the judges will set them anyway.  Then, even when the plaintiffs are vocal about not wanting a trial in that particular case, judges often insist they go forward anyway.  Even stipulated/agreed Orders to continue a trial or vacate a trial Order often go unsigned. 

Sometimes, where trial has been set in violation of Rule 1.440, judges will recognize the error and fix it.  (The judges in Pinellas and Hillsborough in particular are good about this, striving to follow the law.)  In many others cases, though, judges will proceed with trial anyway.  In foreclosure circles, one county has become known for using a stamp – DENIED – right on the motion to vacate trial Order, without a hearing.  Case not at issue?  Doesn’t matter.  Less than 30 days’ notice?  Doesn’t matter.  Bank doesn’t want a trial?  Doesn’t matter.  We’re going to trial! 

Often, judges won’t proceed with trial where the defendant hasn’t filed an Answer but will essentially force the Answer to be filed forthwith.  How is this accomplished?  Easily – either deny the motion to dismiss (often without a hearing), or sua sponte set a CMC to ensure the case gets at issue.   Some courts use CMCs as a way to, in my view, browbeat parties into settling.  One county, for example, has started setting three CMCs at once – one per week for three consecutive weeks, requiring in-person attendance, at mass-motion calendars that last an hour or more, with no input from counsel on when the CMCs are scheduled.  You’re not available?  Too bad.  You don’t need a CMC three weeks in a row?  Yes, you do.  Your case will get at issue and it will be set for trial. 

Oh, and if you want to set a hearing in this county, you have to mail in a form – MAIL IN A FORM – and wait for them to respond to you, by mail, with a form that gives you a set hearing date, without any input from you on when that hearing takes place. 

What dominates the thinking from the judiciary – again, not my speculation, but something the judges openly discuss – is their desire to “close” cases.  That’s the monster that the legislature has created – evaluating the performance of judges not based on their work as judges but based on the results set forth in an Excel spreadsheet.  How many foreclosure lawsuits were filed in that county?  How many judgments have been entered?  If the ratio of judgments entered to cases filed is high enough, then the judges in that county are doing a good job and deserve more funding from the legislature.  If not, then those judges and JAs can all suffer through the many thousands of cases without more help. 

The dynamic is so perverse that I’ve seen judges refuse to cancel foreclosure sales even when both sides ask them to. 

Plaintiff’s lawyer:  “We don’t want this foreclosure sale to go forward, judge.” 

Defendant’s lawyer:  “We are living in this house.  We don’t want this foreclosure sale to go forward, judge.” 

Judge:  “Foreclosure sale will go forward as scheduled.” 

Huh? 

This dynamic is particularly difficult to take when the parties have reached a settlement.  For example, loan modifications sometimes happen after a judgment but before a sale.  That means, essentially, that both sides are willing to forego foreclosure with the homeowner resuming monthly mortgage payments.  Incredibly, based partly on their desire to “close” a case, some judges will force a foreclosure sale to go forward even when both parties don’t want it to, having settled their dispute via a loan modification.

 Plaintiff’s lawyer:  “We have agreed to a loan modification.  We want the foreclosure sale cancelled.” 

Defendant’s lawyer:  “We have agreed to a loan modification.  We want the foreclosure sale cancelled.” 

Judge:  “Foreclosure sale will go forward as scheduled.” 

Huh? 

Even when both sides are able to resolve disputes before trial, even then they sometimes can’t escape a dress-down from the judiciary.  For instance, I’ve watched judges threaten Bar grievances against lawyers – yes, Bar grievances – where they settled the lawsuit by consenting to a foreclosure judgment with a deficiency waiver and extended sale date.  Mind you, that’s a perfectly legitimate way to compromise and settle a foreclosure lawsuit – bank gets the house, homeowner avoids any further liability and gets to stay in the house longer so as to pack up and move – but the prospect of the sale date getting pushed out 4-5 months angers some judges.  “No, you can’t settle that way.  The sale has to happen sooner.”  Yes, I’ve seen settlements like this rejected with the sale set sooner than the parties agreed.

Huh? 

There’s absolutely no rule or law that requires a sale to happen sooner where the parties agree.  Unfortunately, the judges are motivated by having that case “closed” so the numbers on the spreadsheet look better for the legislature. 

My natural response is to lament the unfairness of it all.  After all, that homeowner gave up the chances of winning at trial predicated on getting more time in the house.  I find it terribly unfair that the homeowner gave up a right to trial in exchange for an extended sale date that the judge took away … right?  Some judges would scoff at that notion.  After all, I’ve heard several times, in open court, ”there is no defense to foreclosure,” or “I’ve never seen a valid defense to foreclosure,” or words of that ilk.  Never mind that I’ve had many dozens of foreclosure cases dismissed throughout Florida, including several at trial (25 different judges have dismissed a lawsuit of mine on paragraph 22 noncompliance, for example) … there is no valid defense to foreclosure and, hence, no reason for an extended sale date. 

Another county has become known for punishing any defendants who force a trial to proceed.  I personally observed the judge begin every hearing by telling the homeowners and their counsel that they “better” accept a 120-day extended sale date, as if that “offer” was rejected then it would be “off the table” after the trial.  The implication here was obvious to everyone in the room … You want to show up and force the bank to prove its case?  You’ll lose, and I’ll punish you by ruling against you and forcing you to move out sooner. 

Some would say that the way to deal with this madness is to appeal.  Easier said than done.  Homeowners facing foreclosure are often in no position to fund an appeal.  I’ve taken some appeals for free, but there’s only so many I can handle that way.  Oh, and even if you get beyond the issue of funding, go look for published decisions that are pro-homeowner in the First DCA, Third DCA, or Fifth DCA.  Many thousands of foreclosure cases have been adjudicated in those areas in the past several years.  How many favorable rulings do you think have come out of those jurisdictions during that time?  I’ll give you a hint – not many.  In many ways, appealing in those parts of the state is like standing at the bottom of Mount Everest and being told “climb.” 

Dealing with this dynamic has been very difficult in recent months.  It’s a hard pill to swallow.  It’s difficult to watch the judicial system bend at the direction of the legislature.  It’s tough to know the concept of “separation of powers” that we all learned in elementary school is being cast aside.  It’s hard to feel like the most fundamental concepts of due process are being sacrificed to push lawsuits faster when even the plaintiffs in those lawsuits don’t so desire.  It’s hard to feel like these procedures have made it impossible for me to help homeowners in certain parts of the state.  It’s frustrating that many reading this will be upset at the entire judiciary, not realizing there are many circuit judges – particularly in Hillsborough, Pinellas, and other areas within the ambit of Florida’s Second District – who are striving to be fair and follow the law notwithstanding all of the pressure from the legislature. 

Mostly, though, I’m disappointed.  I’m disappointed that such perverse procedures are happening in our courts every day yet nobody is talking about it – and many don’t even realize it’s happening.  I’m disappointed that the justice system I knew is eroding.  I’m not going to find a dictionary definition, but that’s what erosion is – a slow process of deterioration such that, before too long, that thing which previously existed is no more. 

I hope everyone shares this blog.  I hope my friends, colleagues, attorneys and homeowners all understand what’s happening in our courts.  I hope everyone stands up to the legislature and demands it stop this madness.  Most of all, I hope the erosion of our judiciary stops … soon.

Living Lies, Telling It Like It Is! Thank You!

New post on Livinglies’s Weblog

Federal Agent Misconduct in Favor of BofA and McCarthy Holthus and Levine law firm?

http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/federal-agent-misconduct-in-favor-of-bofa-and-mccarthy-holthus-and-levine-law-firm/

by Neil Garfield

HAS FORECLOSURE DEFENSE BECOME A TERROR THREAT?

WHO IS TERRIFIED HERE?

This is a story about abuse of power or abuse of apparent power. The object is to cover-up crimes that remain largely undetected because the complex maze created by the “Thirteen Banks.”The stakes could not be higher. Either the current major Banks will be sustained or they will come crashing down with a feeding frenzy on a carcass of a predator that stole tens of trillions of dollars from multiple countries, hundreds of millions of people, and millions of homes across the world that should, by all accounts under the Law, still belong to the owner who was displaced by foreclosure. The banks are willing to do anything and they are paying outsize fees and other legal expenses (topping $100 Billion now).

The agents involved — Mike Lum from Homeland Security, Tim Hines, FBI Agent, and Sean Locksa, FBI agent — were either moonlighting (the agents say they were acting in their official capacity) and using their badges in appropriately or they were sent to intimidate litigants with Bank of America represented by McCarthy Holthus and Levine. A few years back, I received reports that the law firm, and in particular attorney Levine, had sent letters to local prosecutors to request action against people who were defending their property from foreclosure. The agents admitted to Blomberg today that they received a “tip” and that “it” was “no longer” a criminal manner and that they had ended their investigation.

In one prior case I saw a letter and I believe I might have seen an affidavit signed by Levine. The result was a series of indictments against one individual that were later dismissed. I have no information on the other cases all dating back to around 2010. I know one of the people, the one who I know was indicted, spent the last bit of her money hiring a criminal attorney to defend her. The case was “settled with a dismissal.” She subsequently lost two homes that were previously unencumbered in a foreclosure where different parties stepped in to foreclose than the ones who asked for lift stay in her bankruptcy. None of the parties were creditors or properly identified.

I now believe I have enough information to connect the dots, and raise the question as to whether members of local, federal and state law enforcement are colluding (or are being wrongfully used by the suggestion of false information) with Bank of America and at least one law firm — McCarthy Holthus and Levine — in which litigants and perhaps witnesses are intimidated into submission to wrongful foreclosures. The information contained in this article relates primarily to Arizona and to a lesser degree, California. I have no information on any other such activity in any other state of the union.

It also appears as though Bank of America and McCarthy Holthus and Levine were taking advantage of some sloppiness at the Post Office, for which the Postmaster in Simi Valley has apologized and sent a refund to the complainant, Darrell Blomberg whose story can be read below. The interesting thing here is that Blomberg reports that McCarthy Holthus and Levine directly received a letter that was addressed to Celia Mora, a suspected robo signor who apparently lives in Simi Valley, according to the post office, but whose mail bears a San Diego postmark.

The joint terrorism task force supposedly represented by the three men identified above, will not answer calls relating to this matter. Thus we only have Blomberg’s report and my own information and analysis — and of course public record. We do have a callback received today by Blomberg who reports that the agents answered a limited number of questions.

The information contained in this report is substantially corroborated by another source who, like Blomberg I consider to have the highest integrity and who was also visited this past week by the same agents who visited Blomberg. Since no specific act was alleged in the interviews except the perfectly legal request to the post office to confirm an address of a potential witness and test mailings to see who was receiving the mailings, it is hard to conclude anything other than that these agents were being used officially or unofficially to intimidate litigants who have been successful at defending their homes in foreclosure for years, and to intimidate them into ceasing their factual and investigative help to other homeowners who are also being wrongfully foreclosed.

If these interviews were sanctioned by the terrorism task force, the FBI or Homeland security it clearly represents the use of Federal law enforcement authority for the benefit of gaining a civil advantage — a crime in most jurisdictions. How high the orders went in those organization I do not know. If there were no such orders and these agents were doing a “favor” then they are subject to discipline for misuse of their badge and deliberately misleading the persons interviewed into thinking that this was an official investigation. The agencies involved might be negligent in supervising the activity of these agents. Neither of the sources for this story have any mark on their record except the mark of distinction — one having worked for decades in law enforcement in economic crimes.

Was Darrel Blomberg getting too close to the truth?

In litigation, one of the points raised by Blomberg was that Celia Mora — allegedly signed an affidavit perhaps by herself and perhaps as a robo signor. The issue of forgery didn’t come up. There was a San Diego post mark same day as the affidavit was allegedly signed 160 miles away. Blomberg’s position was Mora had no actual authority no actual executive position or managerial position, and signed clerically under instruction without knowledge of the contents. That is it. The fact that McCarthy Holthus and Levine actually received the letter addressed to Mora through normal postal service leads one to believe that the affidavit may have been created at the law firm and perhaps even signed there in Arizona. Hence any criminal behavior suggested was not the work of Blomberg but could have been the work of the law firm or Bank of America. To my knowledge there is no investigation pending relating to the use of the mails, false documents, improper signatures, lack of authority or any of the issues presented by Blomberg.

From there it became a vague charge of harassment communicated by three Federal Agents. Harassment was the word used by the agents in the interview with Blomberg and the interview with my other source. But no specific act was stated even in passing as to what act would be investigated as harassment, no less a matter of national security. More telling, when the agents left both interviews, neither source was instructed or requested to stop any specific act. That leads to the question, if there was no conduct they sought to stop, why were they there at all?

Note that McCarthy Malthus and Levine has been replaced by the law firm of Bryan Cave since June, 2013 in Blomberg’s case. Generally speaking Greg Iannelli, Esq. handles the more sensitive pieces of litigation that could blow the lid off of the fraudulent scheme of securitization.

Read Blomberg’s account here —> 2013-08-29, Unexpected Visit from the National Joint Terrorism Task Force

Background and analysis: Why do the banks continue to use low paid clerical workers to sign affidavits and other documents for which they obviously lack authority or knowledge? Why won’t a true executive with true authority and actual personal knowledge based upon his or her own actual observation, investigation and analysis to make sure the foreclosure is proper as to the property, the persons, the balance due and the existence of a default — especially with reference to the actual creditor’s books of account?

Convenience doesn’t cover it. With legal costs topping $100 Billion it would be impossible to pass the giggle test on any explanation of convenience when it comes to the paperwork. My conclusion is that it is worth getting embarrassed in court as long as the number of times is small enough that the overall scheme is not toppled. The use of clerical personnel to sign and approve documents relating to foreclosure is akin to allowing teller’s decide whether you can have a loan on that new car or new house. It doesn’t happen. If it doesn’t happen when the “loan” goes out, then it is fair to assume that the same standards would apply when the loan turns bad and comes back in.

Think about it. The Banks are reporting record profits. U. S. Bank reported $42 Billion in just one quarter. They are attributing their profits to proprietary trading — something I have attributed to laundering the illicit retention of funds that should have been used to pay investors the principal and accrued interest that was due on the promise of investment banks when they issued bogus mortgage bonds. That money was received by the Banks as agents for the investors and therefore, whether paid or not, is a credit against the account receivable owned by the investors.

The Glaski appellate attorneys gratuitously admitted that the true owner of the debts will never be known. Yet the true relationship between the homeowners and the lenders is regarded as known and enforceable. In short, the position of the Banks is that we don’t know who this money belongs to but it must belong to someone so we are going to collect it and foreclose. We’ll get back to you later on what we did with the money. The Banks are required to take that idiotic position because (a) it is still working in court and (b) they get to avoid liability to investors, guarantors, insurers, borrowers and government agencies that could exceed $10 trillion. So $100 Billion in legal expenses is only 1% of their exposure. It is easy to see how the Math works. If the legal expenses were a far more significant portion of the money the Banks were holding then they would find another way to deal with it. 

If the false trading and laundering of money was properly entered on the books as merely repatriating money that was hidden, the investors would be spared the losses that threaten our pensions and cities. It would also alleviate or eliminate the corresponding account payable due from homeowners, city budgets and other “borrowers” who were the unwitting pawns in a scheme to defraud investors. The collateral damage to all citizens, all taxpayers, all consumers, all workers and all homeowners has been obvious since 2007.

The extraordinary story is aggravated by the knowledge that the legal expenses of the Banks has now topped $100 Billion. Like I said, think about it. Nobody spends $100 Billion unless it is worth it. It is worth the price because of the amount of liability they are avoiding, and the amount of money they stole that went offshore. The amount of the theft can be estimated in a variety of ways, and the results are always the same. They siphoned trillions of dollars from many countries. In the U.S. alone it appears that the total was in excess of $17 Trillion, which is $3 Trillion MORE than the total amount of lending on residential “loans.” Extrapolating the most recent profit report from U. S. Bank from a quarter (three months) to a year, that one Bank is reporting annual earnings from “proprietary” trading in excess of $160 Billion per year. That is one of 18 Banks that were involved in this crime against humanity. Do the math.

So the Banks retain money that they never legally earned at the expense of deceived investors, Cities and sovereign wealth funds AND at the expense of the “borrowers” in the “underlying” deals. And by not crediting the lenders, the corresponding reduction of the account payable from “Borrowers” is also absent. No consent for principal reduction is required because the balance has also been reduced or extinguished by payment. Follow the money trail and the results was astonish you. This is like organized crime with all the trimmings of governmental complicity.

Now I am reporting that based upon a pattern of conduct that appears particularly egregious in Arizona, this unholy alliance between the people who committed the wrongs and government is becoming apparent. Who would have imagined indictments and “investigations” of people litigating their cases against the Banks after the scale the crime became apparent in 2008-2009?

CAVEAT: The agents in the Blomberg interview insist they were acting in their official capacity and I take them at their word. My problem with that assumption is that it means the system is susceptible of manipulation by attorneys who have no problem playing dirty tricks to gain a civil advantage. Or, worse, it means that there are high level people in the system who are willing to look the other way when this behavior pops up.

By this point in the savings and loan scandal in the 1980’s more than 800 bank presidents and loan officers, along with mortgage brokers and originators had been convicted by a jury and were serving their sentences. This time the tally is zero. But the reverse is not true. Mortgage brokers and originators and investors who played the system against itself have been investigated, prosecuted and sentenced to prison. And even homeowners have been accused of crimes that were identical to the crimes committed by Banks on a much larger scale. Steal a million, go to jail. Steal a Trillion and get immunity because the finance system might not survive removing the criminals from our society. No longer a nation of laws we have become a nation of men, corrupt men, who continue to accumulate wealth and power as they channel their illicit gains into reported Bank “profits” and control over world natural resources.

For about three years I have been investigating an unholy alliance between a law firm, McCarthy Holthus and Levine, Bank of America, U.S. Bank and law enforcement. It appears as though they have some special influence and that local, state and Federal law enforcement agents are acting as collectors and intimidators outside the boundaries of the law. Prosecutors have followed this line of attack against those pro se litigants who are getting close to the truth that the foreclosures — all of them — were bogus, if they were based upon mortgages and deeds of trust carrying claims of securitization, arising from Assignment and Assumption Agreements, Pooling and Servicing Agreements, and false prospectuses to investors.

The attached report from Darrel Blomberg, a person of unparalleled integrity, tells the story of agents from the FBI who (whether they realized it or not) are clearly acting at the behest and for the benefit of Bank of America, who was represented by McCarthy Holthus and Levine. In the past week, the agents have been visiting at least two people based upon a “harassment” allegation. The agents declared themselves to be part of a joint terrorism task force. The act of harassment was a request for confirmation of address and confirmation of address that ended up both in the offices of Bank of America and the office of McCarthy Holthus and Levine. It was addressed to the U.S. Postmaster who apologized for gaffes in processing the requests and even refunded money to Blomberg. No investigation has been threatened by the U.S. Postal inspector against either the Bank or the law firm. And none has been threatened against Blomberg.

Having a few pages of the attempt to get address of a robo signor whose signature appears to have been forged, these agents have interviewed two people in Arizona that have been known to provide factual assistance to other homeowners and whose own cases have been spread out over many years as the Bank continues to fail in its attempt to claim ownership or verify the balance of the debt. These agents identified themselves as having been dispatched from the FBI, Homeland security and the joint task force. Whether they were merely moonlighting or were in fact dispatched by their superiors, it is clear that no criminal matter was under investigation, and that their purpose was to intimidate two people who fortunately are not easily intimidated. Based upon my investigation it appears as though that law Firm, McCarthy, Holthus and Levine who is frequently replaced by Bryan Cave, has been doing dirty work for the banks through contacts in law enforcement.

It is happening and this should be stopped before it becomes a commonplace act throughout the country.

In the final analysis the issue of ownership of the loan is going to unravel this mess because it is only then that we can look at the books of account and see what money is owed on the original account receivable for the creditor/investor/REMIC.

The analysis of ownership does not merely look to the agreements the parties entered into because the label parties give to a transaction does not determine its character. See Helvering v. Lazarus & Co. 308 U.S. 252, 255 (1939). The analysis must examine the underlying economics and the attendant facts and circumstances to determine who owns the mortgage notes for tax purposes. See id. The court in In re Kemp documents in painful detail how Countrywide failed to transfer possession of a note to the pool backing a Mortgage Backed Security (MBS) so that Countrywide failed to comply with the requirements necessary for the mortgage to comply with the REMIC rules. See In re Kemp, 440 F.R. 624 (Bkrtcy D.N.J. 2010). Defendant in this case has done exactly what was adjudicated in Kemp, failure to sufficiently show a timely transfer that complied with the strict language of the trusts’ Agreements.

As the Kemp court notes, “[f]rom the maker’s standpoint, it becomes essential to establish that the person who demands payment of a negotiable note, or to whom payment is made, is the duly qualified holder. Otherwise, the obligor is exposed to the risk of double payment, or at least to the expense of litigation incurred to prevent duplicative satisfaction of the instrument. These risks provide makers (Plaintiff in this case) with a recognizable interest in demanding proof of the chain of title” (specifically referring to the trust participants). 440 B.R. at 631 (quoting Adams v. Madison Realty & Dev., Inc., 853 F.2d 163, 168 (3d Cir. N.J. 1988). And because the originator did not comply with the legal niceties, the beneficial owner of the debt, the trustee, cannot file its proof of claim either. 

Another Great Article From Living Lies, Telling It Like It Is!

LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Neil Garfield

“We are still in the death grip of the banks as they attempt to portray themselves as the bulwarks of society even as they continue to rob us of homes, lives, jobs and vitally needed capital which is being channeled into natural resources so that when we commence the gargantuan task of repairing our infrastructure we can no longer afford it and must borrow the money from the thieves who created the gaping hole in our economy threatening the soul of our democracy.” Neil Garfield, livinglies.me

We all know that dozens of people rose to power in Europe and Asia in the 1930′s and 1940′s who turned the world on its head and were responsible for the extermination of tens of millions of people. World War II still haunts us as it projected us into an arms race in which we were the first and only country to kill all the people who lived in two cities in Japan. The losses on both sides of the war were horrendous.
Some of us remember the revelations in 1982 that the United States actively recruited unrepentant Nazi officers and scientists for intelligence and technological advantages in the coming showdown with what was known as the Soviet Union. Amongst the things done for the worst war criminals was safe passage (no prosecution for war crimes) and even new identities created by the United States Department of Justice. Policy was created that diverted richly deserved consequences into rich rewards for knowledge. With WWII in the rear view mirror policy-makers decided to look ahead and prepare for new challenges.

Some of us remember the savings and loans scandals where banks nearly destroyed everything in the U.S. marketplace in the 1970′s and 1980′s. Law enforcement went into high gear, investigated, and pieced together the methods and complex transactions meant to hide the guilt of the main perpetrators in and out of government and the business world. More than 800 people went to jail. Of course, none of the banks had achieved the size that now exists in our financial marketplace.

Increasing the mass of individual financial institutions produced a corresponding capacity for destruction that eclipsed anything imagined by anyone outside of Wall Street. The exponentially increasing threat was ignored as the knowledge of Einstein’s famous equation faded into obscurity. The possibilities for mass destruction of our societies was increasing exponentially as the mass of giant financial service companies grew and the accountability dropped off when they were allowed to incorporate and even sell their shares publicly, replacing a system, hundreds of years old in which partners were ultimately liable for losses they created.

The next generation of world dominators would be able to bring the world to its knees without firing a shot or gassing anyone. Institutions grew as malignancies on steroids and created the illusion of contributing half our gross domestic product while real work, real production and real inventions were constrained to function in a marketplace that had been reduced by 1/3 of its capacity — leaving the banks in control of  $7 trillion per year in what was counted as gross domestic product. Our primary output by far was trading paper based upon dubious and fictitious underlying transactions; if those transactions had existed, the share of GDP attributed to financial services would have remained at a constant 16%. Instead it grew to half of GDP.  The “paradox” of financial services becoming increasingly powerful and generating more revenues than any other sector while the rest of the economy was stagnating was noted by many, but nothing was done. The truth of this “paradox” is that it was a lie — a grand illusion created by the greatest salesmen on Wall Street.

So even minimum wage lost 1/3 of its value adjusted for inflation while salaries, profits and bonuses were conferred upon people deemed as financial geniuses as a natural consequence of believing the myths promulgated by Wall Street with its control over all forms of information, including information from the government.

But calling out Wall Street would mean admitting that the United States had made a wrong turn with horrendous results. No longer the supreme leader in education, medical care, crime, safety, happiness and most of all prospects for social and economic mobility, the United States had become supreme only through its military strength and the appearance of strength in the world of high finance, its currency being the world’s reserve despite the reality of the ailing economy and widening inequality of wealth and opportunity — the attributes of a banana republic.

All of us remember the great crash of 2008-2009. It was as close as could be imagined to a world wide nuclear attack, resulting in the apparent collapse of economies, tens of millions of people being reduced to poverty, tossed out of their homes, sleeping in cars, divorces, murder, riots, suicide and the loss of millions of jobs on a rising scale (over 700,000 per month when Obama took office) that did not stop rising until 2010 and which has yet to be corrected to figures that economists say would mean that our economy is functioning at proper levels. Month after month more than 700,000 people lost their jobs instead of a net gain of 300,000 jobs. It was a reversal of 1 million jobs per month that could clean out the country and every myth about us in less than a year.

The cause lay with misbehavior of the banks — again. This time the destruction was so wide and so deep that all conditions necessary for the collapse of our society and our government were present. Policy makers, law enforcement and regulators decided that it was better to maintain the illusion of business as usual in a last ditch effort to maintain the fabric of our society even if it meant that guilty people would go free and even be rewarded. It was a decision that was probably correct at the time given the available information, but it was a policy based upon an inaccurate description of the disaster written and produced by the banks themselves. Once the true information was discovered the government made another wrong turn — staying the course when the threat of collapse was over. In a sense it was worse than giving Nazi war criminals asylum because at the time they were protected by the Department of Justice their crimes were complete and there existed little opportunity for them to repeat those crimes. It could be fairly stated that they posed no existing threat to safety of the country. Not so for the banks.

Now as all the theft, deceit and arrogance are revealed, the original premise of the DOJ in granting the immunity from prosecution was based upon fraudulent information from the very people to whom they were granting safe passage. We have lost 5 million homes in foreclosure from their past crimes, but we remain in the midst of the commission of crimes — another 5 million illegal, wrongful foreclosures is continuing to wind its way through the courts.

Not one person has been prosecuted, not one statement has been made acknowledging the crimes, the continuing deceit in sworn filings with regulators, and the continuing drain on the economy and our ability to finance and capitalize on innovation to replace the lost productivity in real goods and services.

We are still in the death grip of the banks as they attempt to portray themselves as the bulwarks of society even as they continue to rob us of homes, lives, jobs and vitally needed capital which is being channeled into natural resources so that when we commence the gargantuan task of repairing our infrastructure we can no longer afford it and must borrow the money from the thieves who created the gaping hole in our economy threatening the soul of our democracy. If the crimes were in the rear view mirror one could argue that the policy makers could make decisions to protect our future. But the crimes are not just in the rear view mirror. More crimes lie ahead with the theft of an equal number of millions of homes based on false and wrongful foreclosures deriving their legitimacy from an illusion of debt — an illusion so artfully created that most people still believe the debts exist. Without a very sophisticated knowledge of exotic finance it seems inconceivable that a homeowner could receive the benefits of a loan and at the same time or shortly thereafter have the debt extinguished by third parties who were paid richly for doing so.

Job creation would be unleashed if we had the courage to stop the continuing fraud. It is time for the government to step forward and call them out, stop the virtual genocide and let the chips fall where they might when the paper giants collapse. It’s complicated, but that is your job. Few people lack the understanding that the bankers behind this mess belong in jail. This includes regulators, law enforcement and even judges. but the “secret” tacit message is not to mess with the status quo until we are sure it won’t topple our whole society and economy.

The time is now. If we leave the bankers alone they are highly likely to cause another crash in both financial instruments and economically by hoarding natural resources until the prices are intolerably high and we all end up pleading for payment terms on basic raw materials for the rebuilding of infrastructure. If we leave them alone another 20 million people will be displaced as more than 5 million foreclosures get processed in the next 3-4 years. If we leave them alone, we are allowing a clear and present danger to the future of our society and the prospects for safety and world peace. Don’t blame Wall Street — they are just doing what they were sent to do — make money. You don’t hold the soldier responsible for firing a bullet when he was ordered to do so. But you do blame the policy makers that him or her there. And you stop them when the policy is threatening another crash.

Stop them now, jail the ones who can be prosecuted, and take apart the large banks. IMF economists and central bankers around the world are looking on in horror at the new order of things hoping that when the United States has exhausted all other options, they will finally do the right thing. (see Winston Churchill quote to that effect).

But forget not that the ultimate power of government is in the hands of the people at large and that the regulators and law enforcement and judges are working for us, on our nickle. Action like Occupy Wall Street is required and you can see the growing nature of that movement in a sweep that is entirely missed by those who arrogantly pull the levers of power now. OWS despite criticism is proving the point — it isn’t new leaders that will get us out of this — it is the withdrawal of consent of the governed one by one without political affiliation or worshiping sound sound biting, hate mongering politicians.

People have asked me why I have not until now endorsed the OWS movement. The reason was that I wanted to give them time to see if they could actually accomplish the counter-intuitive result of exercising power without direct involvement in a corrupt political process. They have proven the point and they are likely to be a major force undermining the demagogues and greedy bankers and businesses who care more about their bottom line than their society that gives them the opportunity to earn that bottom line.

New Fraud Evidence Shows Trillions Of Dollars In Mortgages Have No Owner
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/08/13/2460891/new-fraud-evidence-shows-trillions-of-dollars-in-mortgages-have-no-owner/

From Our Friends at Living Lies – Glaski Decision…

Glaski Decision in California Appellate Court Turns the Corner on “Getting It”

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Neil Garfield  @:

http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/glaski-decision-in-california-appellate-court-turns-the-corner-on-getting-it/

On the other hand we should not assume that they have arrived nor that this decision will have pervasive effects throughout California or elsewhere in the United States or other countries.

J.P. Morgan did suffer a crushing defeat in this decision. And the borrower definitely receive the benefits of a judicial decision that will allow the borrower to sue for wrongful foreclosure including equitable and legal relief which in plain language means reversing the foreclosure and getting damages. Probably one of the most damaging conclusions by the appellate court is that an examination of whether the loan ever made it into the asset pool is proper in determining the proper party to initiate a foreclosure or to offer a credit bid at a foreclosure auction.  The court said that alleged transfers into the trust after the cutoff date are void under New York State law which is the law that governs the common-law trusts created by the banks as part of the fraudulent securitization scheme.

Before you give them a standing ovation remember that it is possible for additional documentation to be created, fabricated and forged showing that despite the apparent violation of the cutoff date, the trustee has accepted the loan into the trust. This will most likely be a lie. I don’t think there is any entity acting as trustee of a trust that doesn’t know that it is under intense scrutiny and doesn’t want to be subject to liability that could amount to trillions of dollars advanced by investors with the purchase of bogus mortgage-backed bonds that were presumably managed by the trustee but in reality not managed at all  because the bonds were worthless. This gave the banks the opportunity to claim that they owned the bonds and therefore had an insurable interest which gave rise to the whole problem with AIG and AMBAC and other insurers or parties who had guaranteed the bond, the loan or any loss (credit default swaps).

The fact that the loan in this case was definitely securitized is also interesting. Of course Washington Mutual was stating to everyone that it was not involved in the securitization of mortgage loans when in fact nearly all of the loans originated became subject to claims of securitization. This case explains why I never say that the loan was securitized or that the loan was in any particular trust, to wit: I don’t believe that a funded trust exists with the ability to purchase loans and therefore I don’t believe the loans are in any of the asset pools. So when people ask me how they can prove which trust their loan is actually in, I reply that they are asking the wrong question.

What is being played out here in this case and hundreds of thousands of other cases is a representation by the foreclosing entity that the trust owns the loan when in fact it never owned the loan nor could it because the money that was advanced by investors was never deposited into the trust. We have the same banks representing to regulatory authorities and insurers that it is the bank and not the trust that owns the loan even though the bank merely made the loan using money advanced by investors who believed that they were buying mortgage-backed bonds. The truth is they were merely making a deposit into an account maintained by the investment bank. The resulting transactions do not qualify for exemption as securities or insurance under the 1998 law. Nor do they qualify for REMIC treatment under the Internal Revenue Code.

In other words if you take a close look and actually follow the path of the money and the path of the paper you will find that despite the pronouncements from the Department of Justice and other agencies, this is a simple fraud case using a Ponzi model. The hallmark of a Ponzi model is that it collapses as soon as the investors stop buying the bogus securities. If the government cares to do so it can freely prosecute the individuals and companies involved without any air of exemption under the 1998 law because none of the parties followed the securitization path presumed by the 1998 law. So we are back to this, to wit: a security is a security and subject to SEC regulations and insurance is an insurance contract subject to insurance regulators, and fraud is fraud subject to recovery of restitution, compensatory damages, punitive damages, treble damages etc.

You should remember when reading this decision that the appellate court was not ruling in favor of the borrower granting the substantive relief the borrower  was seeking. The appellate court merely reversed the trial court decision to dismiss the borrower’s claims. That only means that the borrower now as an opportunity to prove the elements of quiet title, wrongful foreclosure, slander of title, cancellation of instruments and relief under California’s version of unfair business practices. But the devil is in the details and proving the case requires aggressive discovery and aggressive preparation for trial. It is highly probable that the case will settle. The bank will probably be willing to pay almost any amount of money to avoid a judgment setting forth the elements of a wrongful foreclosure and how the bank violated the law.

The Bank will attempt to avoid any final order that undermines the value of loans that are subject to claims of securitization, because those loans supposedly support the value of the bogus mortgage-backed bonds sold to investors.  Any such final order would also undermine the balance sheet of J.P. Morgan and any other major bank carrying the mortgage bonds as assets on their balance sheet. If those assets are diminished, then the bank is not as well funded as it has been reporting. In fact, those assets might well vanish completely from the balance sheet of those banks, causing the banks to be seized by the FDIC and broken up into smaller pieces for regional and community banks to pick up. Hence this decision represents a risk factor that could eliminate the legal fiction created by smoke and mirrors from Wall Street banks, to wit: it is not the borrowers who are deadbeats, it is the banks who are broke and whose management has run off with billions and perhaps trillions of dollars that should be in the United States economy. The absence of that money lies at the root of our unemployment and low economic activity.

This Glaski case has many of the elements that we have been discussing for years. Fabricated documents, forgeries, perjury, false affidavits and no money trail to backup the story painted by the fabricated documents. And of course it has our old friend Washington Mutual Bank And the supposed take over by Chase Bank that never actually happened.

And it involves the issue of assignments and the fact that the assignment is not the transaction itself but only a report of a transaction. If the borrower proves that the transaction reported in the assignment or other instrument of conveyance never occurred, or if the borrower is successful in shifting the burden of proof to the bank to show that it did occur, the assignment will have no value whatsoever unless the transaction is present, to wit: that someone actually purchased the loan through the payment of money or other valuable consideration that was received by a party who actually owned the loan.

Thus even if Chase Bank were able to show that it entered into a transaction in which the loans were transferred (something we can find no evidence of which the FDIC receiver says never occurred) that would only be the equivalent of a quit claim deed, to wit: whoever received the consideration for the transfer of the loans was merely conveying any interest they had even if they had no interest at all. Hence the transactions by which Washington Mutual allegedly came to be the owner of the loan must be examined in the same way as the transaction between the Washington Mutual bankruptcy estate and chase bank.

You should also take note that the decision was published with the admonition that it is  “not to be published in the official reports.”  this is further indication that the court is concerned about the far-reaching effects of the decision and essentially tells trial judges that they do not have to follow it. So for those who wish to point to this decision and say “game over” we are not there yet. But I do think that we passed the halfway point and we are probably in the fifth or sixth inning of a nine inning game. Translating that to time, I would estimate that it’s going to take another three or four years to clean up this mess and that it might take several decades to clean up the title corruption that was created by the banks.

http://stopforeclosurefraud.com/2013/08/01/glaski-v-bank-of-america-ca5-5th-appellate-district-securitization-failed-ny-trust-law-applied-ruling-to-protect-remic-status-non-judicial-foreclosure-statutes-irrelevant-because-sa/

Amazon Has Joined the Ranks of the Don’t Give a Shits

nootkabear's avatarJ & J Ranch, Stone Mtn, GA

From:amazon-transcript@amazon.com (amazon-transcript@amazon.com)
Sent:Thu 7/25/13 2:45 AM
To:nootkabear@ (nootkabear@)
 Your AccountAmazon.com
Message From Customer Service
Hello, Here’s a copy of the chat transcript you requested:Initial Question: Something I Ordered > Order# 102- > When will I get this?
06:26 AM(GMT) Rajeev(CSA): Hello, my name is Rajeev. I’ll be glad to help you today.

 
06:27 AM(GMT) Janet McDonald: The tracking shows it was damaged in shipping and undeliverable. Does no one plan to contact me about this issues, and what about the fact I paid for it and am still waiting?

 
06:27 AM(GMT) Rajeev(CSA): I’m sorry that you were not informed about the status of the order.

 
06:28 AM(GMT) Rajeev(CSA): In this case I can help you with a complete refund.

 
06:28 AM(GMT) Janet McDonald:  What about getting me the product I paid for and give me a refund.

 

06:30…

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