This is the story of what happens when an average couple is up against a giant, wealthy, powerful bank. Unfortunately the result is what the result always is when people are on their own against the wealthy and powerful: the bank ends up with all of their money, takes their house to sell and throws them out onto the street. In this case the bank is Wells Fargo.

The quick version of this terrible story is that Norman and Oriane Rousseau of Newbury Park, California were scammed into a predatory mortgage. But they made their payments anyway, always paying with a cashier’s check in person at the same branch. Then one day the bank misapplied their payment and said they still owed the money. This started a long, nasty process that led to the bank evicting the Rousseaus from their home.

Here’s the shocker: right at the start the Rousseaus came up with proof that the bank had received the payment and had cashed the check. But the bank continued to claim it had missed the payment, gave the Rousseaus the runaround, started applying fees, and used it as an excuse to foreclose on the house anyway.

Read full article here

The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by theYemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually a double agent who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

Ok so this Greenberg / Zuckerberg thing is getting weirder by the second.
A Jacob Greenberg was arrested for possession of Marijuana and this mugshot was taken. It was later revealed that this could indeed be the man the world knows as Mark Zuckerberg.

His family members include David Rockefeller, his Grandfather. A little strange because Rothschild owns 8% of Facebook shares. Both Rothschild and Rockefeller are well known names.

Where it gets weirder is when I looked at who his (Greenberg) other Grandfather could be. Low and behold:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R._Greenberg

Former CEO of AIG!

And guess what his wife’s name is: Corinne Phyllis Zuckerman.

Am I just falling into mindless conspiracy at this point?

A new lawsuit, which is bordering on the unbelievable, implicates the Obama administration and some of the world’s largest banks in the largest international money laundering case in history.

This global money laundering network was allegedly formed during the Obama administration and helped banks rob U.S. home owners through offshore affiliates in infamous tax havens and money laundering hubs like the Cayman Island, Isle of Man, Luxembourg and Malaysia.

A press release published by Marketwatch (a website owned by the Wall Street Journal) via Marketwire on April 23, 2012, by America’s Spire Law Group, revealed that a mass tort action on behalf of home owners across the United States has been filed in the Supreme Court of New York, County of Kings.

The release states that the suit implicates every major bank servicer and their subsidiaries, as well as the Obama administration which allegedly was privately ratifying the formation of shell corporations in violation of not only the USA PATRIOT Act, but also State and Federal law as well.

This is all while the administration was very publicly encouraging home owners to modify their loans.

The suit, which has been assigned Index No. 500827 and was filed by the Spire Law Group and their affiliates and partners throughout the United States, also alleges that Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo Bank, Citibank, Citigroup, One West Bank, among other federally chartered banks stole hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. home owners through little-known offshore companies.

The money was then laundered through offshore corporations, and surprisingly the suit is quite explicit in identifying specific companies as well as the countries they are located in which were used to help defraud huge sums of money from Americans.

These activities are violations of the guidelines of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), New York state law, not to mention other states as well as federal law.

Columbus, Ohio-based trial lawyer and author Eric J. Wittenberg made some quite heated statements on behalf of the plaintiffs in the case.

“The laundering of trillions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money — and the wrongful taking of the homes of those taxpayers — was known by the Administration and expressly supported by it. Evidence uncovered by the plaintiffs revealed that the Administration ignored its own agencies’ reports — and reports from the Department of Homeland Security — about this situation, dating as far back as 2010,” Wittenberg said.

“Worse, the Administration purported to endorse a ‘national bank settlement’ without disclosing or having any public discourse whatsoever about the thousands of foreign tax havens now wholly owned by our nation’s banks. Fortunately, no home owner is bound to enter into this fraudulent bank settlement,” he added.

The many home owners involved in the case are suing these major financial institutions and their foreign allies not only for fraud and larceny but also for conversion and violations of provisions of New York state law and other laws.

Continue reading over at Wake Up World

Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.

The Los Angeles federal court records, which were unsealed Wednesday at the joint request of Wired, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Coalition, highlight a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites.

Apparently, however, the RIAA and music labels’ evidence against Dajaz1, a music blog, never came. Or, if it did, it was not enough to build a case and the authorities returned the site nearly 13 months later without explanation or apology.

Read more here.

John Holdren , Obama’s Science Adviser believes that geo-engineering will assist the planet is stabilizing its weather with regard to global warming.

Holdren sees geo-engineering as a perfectly viable way to cool the planet’s temperature. He fully supports the process of releasing particles of barium, magnesium, aluminum, nano-fibers, bacillus blood spores and other chemicals to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

In an article released in the Council of Foreign Relations Journal by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the organization praised the use of heavy metals into our atmosphere to combat global warming. This reasoning is a hoax, considering that man-made climate change is a lie perpetrated onto the world’s populations by the global Elite and the UN’s IPCC. Scientists worldwide have come to the fact that the sun is heating up not only our Earth, but all the planets in our solar system.

The National Institute of Health has found that geo-engineering is directly responsible for neurotoxins found in human blood, lungs; as well as causing a whole host of neurotoxic conditions such as multiple sclerosis.

Holdren is joining the man-made climate change alarmists who threaten that global warming will not be slowed down in time to reverse the imaginary “tipping point”. One of the claims is that the ice will completely melt in the Arctic; although scientific researchers show that this is blatantly untrue.

A Syracuse University study found that climate change is natural and not caused by man.

The researchers studied the Earth’s heat cycles over 1,000 years in the past until now. They found:

•  Earth is actually cooling
• Arctic ice is not melting
• CO2 is not the cause for the extreme weather changes recently seen

Holdren blames human emissions of CO2 as responsible for droughts, food storage shortages, and rising sea levels, along with the extreme weather we have recently seen.

Holdren is not alone in perpetrating this hoax.

The American Meteorological Society is devising a policy statement that will support this lie by saying that “it is prudent to consider geo-engineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Robert Socolow, a Princeton scientist, told the National Academy that geo-engineering should be a readily made viable option in case climate worsens dramatically.

While sound scientific data shows that CO2 is not the problem, other viable perpetrators are ignored.Geo-engineering itself is grossly detrimental to the atmosphere and a direct causation to the major changes we have witnessed in modern decades.

Holdren is upholding Obama’s goal of cutting greenhouse emissions 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.

Members of Congress are showing signs of opposing Obama’s bill to achieve this goal.

Holdren’s recent statement is obvious fear-mongering propaganda designed to coerce Capitol Hill and the American public of “truths” surmised by unscientific data.

Source: occupycorporatism.com/obamas-science-adviser-says-chemtrails-will-save-the-planet/

How would you feel if a group of young thugs punched you in the face, knocked you to the ground, stripped you naked and took off with your car keys, your watch, your money and your cell phone?  Well, that is exactly what happened to one man in Baltimore recently and it was all caught on camera.  Perhaps the most frightening thing about this incident is that nobody from the crowd of onlookers helped this man.  Instead, most of them appear to have been too busy laughing hysterically at what was happening to him.  Sadly, this kind of behavior is becoming all too common on the streets of America.  The hearts of our young people are growing very cold, and in a lot of major U.S. cities it is simply not safe to go strolling around after the sun goes down anymore.  The man in the video that you are about to see is lucky to have gotten away alive.  When he was punched in the face he fell directly backward and in the video you can hear the sound of his skull loudly hitting the pavement.  But instead of checking to see if he needed medical help, the crowd around the man descended on him like a bunch of crazed looters.  This incident happened on St. Patrick’s Day, but it is only now that the media is starting to take notice of this video.

The YouTube video posted below is a local news report about this incident.  It contains footage of him being knocked out, but it does not contain footage of him being stripped of his clothes….

The video footage of him being violently stripped of his clothes and belongings is on YouTube and it is quite easy to find.  But please be warned that it is quite graphic, and you might not want to watch it.

Sadly, this is just another sign of how much our society is decaying.  And it is not just happening in the big cities.  This kind of behavior is going on in every area of the country and not even the very rural communities are immune from the craziness that is going on.

As I have written about previously, America is becoming a very lawless place and criminals are becoming much bolder.  Very creepy home invasion horror stories are being reported all over the United States and there has been a shocking increase in gang activity in the past few years.

America is rapidly changing and you simply cannot count on most people to show you even an ounce of compassion these days.  Most people simply do not want to get involved in something that is not their business.

For example, would you stop and help an 86-year-old man with a broken leg that was crawling across the pavement at a gas station trying to get assistance?

Well, that exact scenario played out near Detroit recently.  An 86-year-old World War II veteran was brutally carjacked in broad daylight.  After the attack, his leg was broken and he could not walk.  So he started to crawl across the parking lot toward the door of the gas station.

So did anyone help him?

Not according to the surveillance video….

A surveillance video shows Aaron Brantley, 86, struggling to get from the fuel pump to the gas station’s door to get help as people walked and drove by him Wednesday morning.

This is what America is becoming.  A place where nobody cares about each other.

If you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, don’t count on anyone helping you out or even showing you a single ounce of compassion.

But just because the hearts of most Americans are growing cold and hard does not mean that has to happen to you.  The next time that you see someone in a desperate situation out on the streets I hope that you will remember to stop and be kind to that person.

Writes Bill Potter:

This is a beautiful story about an American professional snowboarder’s plans to shred the slopes in Iran next winter as part of a film project called “Boarders Without Borders”. The featured snowboarder doesn’t pull any punches against the Establishment in the interview: She points out the absurdly high US prison population and how nice it will be to arrive and depart from Iran sans TSA groping.  She says she plans to actually interact with Iranians without the slightest fear or hint of any desire to bomb them to kingdom come.

Don’t miss the accompanying video of Iranians enjoying the slopes of their country. Take that, Neocons!

At every recorded price, there is an exchange. For every buyer, there is a seller. Gold has a price. Someone is selling gold.

Why?

There are several possibilities. (1) He thinks the price of gold has peaked. (2) He thinks he has a better use for his capital. (3) It isn’t his gold; he’s selling it on behalf of someone else. If “someone else” is the electorate, then the seller can do what he wants. Voters have no meaningful understanding of gold. In this respect, they are a lot like University of Chicago economists.

Who are the major sellers of gold? Gold mining companies, central banks, gold speculators, and Indians. (Patel, not Tonto.) Then there are short-term speculators who sell promises to deliver gold in the future at a fixed price, but who own no gold. We call them short sellers.

Gold mining companies sell gold because that’s their business. Their gold reserves in the ground are well known and are factored into the prevailing price. Those mines that have in effect sold short at a fixed price reap no profit from a rising price of gold. They already locked in a price, and this is what they are paid when they deliver. He who went long — promised to buy the mine’s output at a fixed price — is the winner. For over five years, numerous mines have been selling short, called forward selling. They won when gold’s price went down. Now they are losing. The amount of gold being sold by mines for future delivery is now drying up. The market has been going against short sellers, i.e., forward sellers.

Central banks have been big sellers, although in a disguised form. They have lent their gold for about 1% per annum — the cheapest borrowed money on earth. They have not reported these loans as sales. Their official gold reserves remain constant. But the leased gold is gone. It was borrowed by large trading companies called bullion banks. They borrowed at 1%, sold the gold, took the money they earned by selling the gold and invested it at 5% or more. It was a sweet, multi-billion dollar deal. But now they are in a squeeze. They owe billions of dollars of gold bullion to central banks, but to get it back, they must buy gold bullion in the open market, which is now a rising market. They are losing money, big time. What has saved them so far is that the central banks are not demanding repayment. Meanwhile, the public doesn’t know that the leased gold is gone. The central banks do not publish these figures.

Then there are direct sales of gold by the central banks. The most recent sales were made by the Bank of England. It sold off at least half of its gold reserves over a 3-year period which ended in March. The man officially responsible for the decision to sell gold is Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has come under fire this month for having made horrendous investment decisions. The INDEPENDENT (May 26) published this story.

Chancellor under attack over sale of gold reservesBy Colin Brown and Jason Nisse

26 May 2002 Gordon Brown has “lost” over 400m pounds by ordering the sale of part of Britain’s gold reserves by the Bank of England. . . .

Figures obtained by the Independent on Sunday also show that his decision to order the Bank of England to part with some of its gold reserves and switch into the euro and yen was also not a good bet for the taxpayer. The value of gold has soared on the world markets as investors have switched to gold.

However, figures issued by the Treasury last week showed that the Bank has lost out to the tune of $578m. Treasury minister Ruth Kelly said the Governor of the Bank, Sir Edward George, had sold 395 tonnes of gold as part of the restructuring of the United Kingdom’s foreign currency reserves since May 1999. The last auction was in March 2002 when the price of gold was $296.50 per ounce. Gold was trading at $320.5 in London when the markets closed on Friday.

When the Chancellor announced the policy in 1999, he said he wanted to diversify our store of wealth. Germany, Australia, Switzerland were among the major holders of gold who were also selling. They agreed in September 1999 to limit sales to 400 tonnes a year in total until 2004. Gold prices started rising after 11 September.

No public official relishes the prospect of being made to look like a dolt. Mr. Brown looks now like a dolt. Sir Eddie George, who heads the Bank of England, looks no wiser. Other central bankers now must decide whether it is a good idea to sell gold. They may wind up looking like Sir Eddie. (“Sir Eddie” doesn’t sound very impressive, does it?)

Of course, major central bankers have a problem. If the public ever learns that the central banks’ gold leasing program has turned into an unannounced gold sales program, with the bullion banks in cahoots with the central banks, and the bullion banks can’t repay the central banks, heads will roll.

A rising price of gold threatens to bankrupt the bullion banks, who dare not go into the market to buy gold for fear of what this will do to gold’s price. So, it’s a waiting game. The bullion bankers are hoping for gold to go down. So are the central bankers. But, at some point, the central bankers will have to demand repayment. At that point, the gold leasing game will end. The bullion banks will go bust, the central banks won’t be repaid, and the public will find out — once again — that you should not trust central banking.

Will that point ever come? Yes. How soon? I think before the end of this decade. But even if it doesn’t, the public will still win out. If the gold leasing game goes on, the public will buy back its gold, which was confiscated from our grandparents or great grandparents. If gold leasing ceases, the people who have bought gold and held onto it will earn enormous rates of return on their investments. Gold-haters will lose; gold bugs will win. That is the way it should be.

Can gold’s price fall to below the bottom of $256? Anything can happen, but this now seems unlikely, short of one last sell-off by central banks.

GOLD INVESTORS

I have discussed gold sales by gold mining companies and central banks. What about gold bullion investors?

With the Federal Reserve System expanding credit money to push down short-term interest rates, and with a recession in capital investing still in force, the question is: “Where can I make a better rate of return than gold?” This year, gold has beaten all other investment categories. Gold investors have to search long and hard to find a better rate of return. Only if they think the price has peaked would they want to sell. But there is little evidence yet that gold’s price has peaked. The predictable threat of the Bundesbank in early April to sell gold — no amount specified — in 2004 had no downward effect on gold’s price. (See Issue 130.)

So, those who invest in gold have to decide: “What to do with the money I gain by selling my gold?” The U.S. stock market is performing poorly. It has been performing poorly for two years. The investor who thinks that inflation is beaten might sell gold to buy U.S. government bonds. But the Median CPI is still above 3.5% per annum for 2002. No deflation is visible in this statistic.

Then there is the traditional buyer of gold jewelry, the Indian father who has daughters. At some price, he will sell. India is becoming a modern economy. There are alternatives to gold for a daughter’s dowry. But today, India is once again facing war. No one likes to think about it, but this war could go nuclear. The West avoided nuclear war, but religious hostilities are very high in the Indian subcontinent.

Pakistan is home base for revolutionary guerrilla forces in Kashmir. That India insists on retaining control over Kashmir seems nutty to the West. So what if Nehru was born there? It is overwhelmingly Muslim. Why not give the residents the right to secede from India? India’s answer: Because they are mostly Muslims, and Nehru was born there.

In the mid-1960′s, I met an Indian journalist who was on a fellowship in the United States. I think he was a Nieman Fellow, the most prestigious of all fellowships in journalism. He was therefore at the top of his profession. He was liberal: anti-caste, pro-democracy. But on the subject of Kashmir, he was adamant: democracy is an irrelevant issue regarding Kashmir. There was no arguing with him. You can imagine what his Pakistani peers believed, with equal fervency.

One million troops are now massed on the Kashmir border. India has a stronger economy and more money than Pakistan. It has far more people. Its conventional military forces are superior. But Kashmir’s mountainous terrain is on Pakistan’s side. If the war stays conventional, should it begin, India’s economy will be strained to pay for it. If the war spreads to Pakistan, then Pakistan is at a disadvantage. The risk of the Pakistan’s use of nuclear weapons rises in such a scenario. SALON (May 28) reports:

A new analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency suggests that between 8 million and 12 million people would be killed in a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, according to a U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.The report presumes that both India and Pakistan successfully use most of the weapons in their nuclear arsenals and target the weapons on populated areas, the official said. The death estimates are in the short-term, and do not include long-term deaths caused by fallout.

Both countries’ nuclear weapons are thought to number in the low dozens and have yields at or below 20 kilotons, putting them in the class of the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Both can deliver the weapons with small fighter-bombers, such as Pakistan’s F-16 and India’s MiG-27, or ballistic missiles.

I predict that Indian sales of gold will decline, even though the price of gold is rising steadily. If hostilities cease, I am willing to reconsider. But hostilities are increasing. Kashmir isn’t going to go away. Neither is Al-Qaeda. SALON also reports:

In a potential blow to the antiterror war, Pakistan appears to be preparing to pull troops away from the Afghan border to focus on its own dispute with India, U.S. defense officials said Tuesday.The Pakistani military presence has been a key element of the U.S. strategy for capturing or killing Taliban and al-Qaida fighters who may have slipped across the border. Without Pakistan’s help, the United States has little short-term prospect of finishing off al-Qaida.

American military officials made clear Tuesday they are worried that the dispute between Pakistan and India over the Kashmir region could disrupt the campaign against the al-Qaida in the anarchic tribal areas of western Pakistan.

“Attention and troops that cannot be focused there, because they’re focused elsewhere, that’s a concern for us, because we need as much assistance as possible in guarding that very porous border,” Victoria Clarke, chief spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told reporters.

“It is a concern when they have to focus attention and people to other parts of the country,” she added.

She said U.S. officials “are encouraging Pakistan to remain involved, as they have been, extensively, in the war on terrorism.”

Pakistan said last week that it might remove troops from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, where they are helping the United States search for al-Qaida and Taliban, and move them toward Kashmir because of the escalating conflict there.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

There has been some increase in demand from Japanese investors this year. There is at least circumstantial evidence that the central bank of China has been accumulating more gold than was believed likely until recent months. But, so far, the upward pressure on gold’s price seems to be from the supply side. Reduced supplies of ready sellers are leading to higher prices.

This is understandable. Reduced supplies of gold are the result more of fear than greed. Gold mining firms burdened with forward contracts see losses ahead: selling a commodity whose price is rising, but not for them. Those competitors who did not indulge in forward sales will prosper. They will bid up the price of mining equipment and labor. This will hurt those mines that are loaded up with obligations to sell at a fixed price. They will face a profits squeeze. So, they are less likely to add to their positions of forward sales.

The same fear factor affects Indian families. They are afraid of war’s effect on rupee-based investments. War also increases demand for gold. So, they could get locked out of the gold jewelry market. Why sell? Stick with a traditional dowry.

Short sellers in the commodity futures market worry about losses. They buy gold futures to close out their positions. This raises gold’s price. So does their departure from the short side of the market. Not only does the supply of gold get tighter, the supply of investors willing to promise to deliver gold gets tighter.

At some point, gold’s rising price will attract the attention of conventional investors. This may be years in the future. I think it probably is. For two decades, gold has moved down. Investors have lost confidence in gold. But cycles do occur. Floors are reached. At some point, rising demand becomes more significant than contracting supply.

Traditional market bottoms occur when existing holders get discouraged and sell. Demand has falls for years. The market gets a reputation for producing nothing but losses. Interest by new investors wanes. Only highly entrepreneurial people are buyers. Existing holders grow discouraged about ever making a profit. They finally sell their positions. Capital shifts from older, experienced, but discouraged holders to new entrepreneurs. This sell- off is what the gold market experienced in 2001.

I believe there will be rising interest in gold over the next few years, but that demand, short of nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent, will be steady rather than greed-driven. Demand will increase, as more investors are brought back into the market. I don’t expect a gold rush by Wall Street. Wall Street is too conventional. It is also allied at the highest levels with central banks and bullion banks. Wall Street is the Establishment.

There is a long-term re-education process ahead. Gold has been attacked, steadily, ever since 1914, when European central banks ceased to redeem their gold certificates, and their governments authorized this massive confiscation of private wealth. The United States joined in, but re- established convertibility after the war ended. Europe didn’t, except for England in 1925, at a pre-war price that could not be maintained without deflation, which the economy got. Britain went off the gold standard in 1931. The United States followed in 1933.

The war on gold is a war of the centralized, grasping State against people with capital. This war is basic to modern democracy: the substitution of the welfare-warfare State for limited civil government. The bias against gold is in the textbooks. It is in the minds of three generations of bankers, industrialists, and investors. A reversal of this bias will not come from within the Establishment. It will be forced on the Establishment.

CONCLUSION

The tide seems to have turned for gold’s price. As the truth about the one-way direction of the central banks’ gold leasing programs becomes clear to a minority of investors (but very few voters and legislators), gold holders and entrepreneurs will conclude that gold’s supplies are far more limited than previously imagined. When they recognize that the overhang of gold is based on a statistical fraud — that the gold is gone and will not be coming back — the upward pressure on gold’s price will accelerate.

The gold leasing phenomenon could become an international Enron. I think it will. What one company got away with temporarily, with the connivance of its accounting form and the regulatory agencies, will be regarded someday as a minor event. What the central banks have done with their accounting systems dwarfs anything in the history of accounting. The stock market eventually exposed Enron as a gigantic accounting fraud. There will be a similar day of reckoning for the central banks.