The Examiner-

State officials are beginning a process that will lead to implementation of a tough new anti-foreclosure law in Massachusetts.

The bill signed by Gov. Deval Patrick earlier this month requires mortgage lenders to offer modifications to some loans that are deemed as “risky.” It also bans lenders from pursuing foreclosures without proper documentation.

[THE EXAMINER]

by CronyChronicles

MYFOX8-

HIGH POINT, N.C. – High Point Police say a man believed to be mentally ill and making suicidal and hostage threats forced the evacuation of the Bank of America call center Friday afternoon.

“He was very irate when he called [911], making some comments about being blown away, his soul and he wasn’t afraid to die,” said Capt. J.T. Stroud of the High Point Police Department.

The unidentified man, made the threats from the parking lot, first by phone to 911 and second by text message to his wife who works inside the building on Piedmont Parkway.

“Everyone was frantic, screaming and yelling” said employee Hasin Graham who went to his car after being evacuated.

“Everybody just started leaving, running out the best way they could whatever exit they could find,” said Graham.

[MYFOX8]

ACLU-

An amazing video posted on The New York Times website today lays out in chilling detail how the National Security Agency is sucking up every piece of communication data in America – from phone calls to emails to cell phone location – and has the ability to tie together all of the information for a single person (watch it here).

The system is explained by William Binney, a code breaker who resigned from the NSA in protest over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping regime. He says that after 9/11, the methods he helped create for spying on foreign powers became pointed domestically – not toward people suspected of terrorism ties, but toward all Americans.

The video is by Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has had unwarranted government attention herself, and is working on a longer film on this subject. Laying out the legal and political battle over this out-of-control surveillance, she writes…

[ACLU.org]

CNBC-

Forget all those shindigs in the Hamptons. Never mind Nantucket.

Some of the biggest Wall Street and Washington powerbrokers are spending Labor Day this year in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The Fir Creek Ranch, which is owned by Evercore Partners founder and chairman Roger Altman, is hosting the wedding of Alison Fisher, the daughter of Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher.

The ranch sits at the base of the Teton Mountains. It is a real, working cattle ranch. The views from its grounds are truly breathtaking.

Altman is just about as close as you can get to the center of the matrix of American political and financial power.

He was Assistant Treasury Secretary during the Carter Administration and Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. He ran the investment bank of Lehman Brothers and sat on the company’s board. He later ran the M&A advisory business of the Blackstone Group. In 1996, he formed the boutique investment banking and private equity firm, Evercore Partners. Evercore was one of the key advisors to General Motors through its bankruptcy.

[CNBC]

image: weddingengagementnoise.com

What could be more important than the RNC week to halt evictions and foreclosures? No, silly not Fraudulent documents used to evict you from your home.

This proves a point that they can stop eviction and foreclosures but not for fraud but for a freakin convention in town.

Make any sense?

In this case we need RNC week all through-out the country!

Tampa Bay Times-

TAMPA — With the Republican National Convention coming and Tropical Storm Isaac right behind, who has time for evictions?

Strapped for manpower, Hillsborough sheriff’s deputies next week will temporarily stop serving notices of foreclosures and evictions.

For distressed residents in Tampa and across the county, that could mean an extra week of breathing room.

Hillsborough’s 2,500 deputies, sheriff’s spokesman Larry McKinnon said, will already have a heck of a to-do list, staffing the convention and dealing with any havoc that blows in from the looming tropical storm.

Posting eviction notices? “That’s like worrying about Pluto right now,” McKinnon said. “It’d be silly … if we’ve got traffic gridlock, traffic lights out, trees down everywhere, and we’re out serving evictions.”

[TAMPA BAY TIMES]

Massive lawsuit awaits if someone dies in this neighborhood.

Daily News-

A second case of West Nile virus was confirmed Friday near a bank-owned home in Studio City containing an algae-green swimming pool.

The family of 17-year-old Javin Reid said they were notified of a positive blood test for West Nile virus following flu-like symptoms.

This week, a next-door neighbor reported testing positive for the virus after she and neighbors had complained for months to bank, code enforcement and public health officials about the dirty pool.

The virus is transmitted to humans via mosquitoes.

“I’m completely incensed – incensed,” said Tony Reid, 48, the boy’s father. “Everyone has been blaming everyone else for the problem.

“They have the authority to fix the problem, but nothing has been done.”

The battle began last spring when neighbors started complaining about a blighted foreclosed home on Bellfield Way owned by U.S. Bank Trust, and serviced by Bank of America.

[DAILY NEWS]

KFOXTV-

EL PASO, Texas —

A civil attorney, Richard Roman, said he warned El Paso County officials about a scheme that resulted in people being unfairly kicked out of their homes, but the county did nothing to stop it. 

KFOX14 News has reported that the County Attorney’s office has filed a lawsuit against several national banks. Roman said they waited too long and now several of his clients have had their lives ruined. 

Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) is what some are calling a scheme by national banks to sell mortgages to each other without paying filing fees, or notifying homeowners. 

People have ended up paying the wrong bank and then faced eviction before they knew what was happening. 

El Paso County has joined nine other Texas counties in a class action suit against the banks.

[KFOXTV]

The Nation-

When the “fail whale” breached at JPMorgan earlier this year, creating billions in embarrassing losses as a result of risky trading, the bank immediately ceased its political giving. Not that the bank didn’t need help from Congress—it certainly did, but a long history of donations to key committees bought CEO Jamie Dimon friendly audiences during hearings exploring the losses. Rather, the bank realized that while on the hot seat, the donations were tainted and likely unwelcome in Congress.

But in a clear indication that JPMorgan’s seat has already cooled considerably, the bank is once again doling out the cash. On July 31, JPMorgan PAC wrote ten checks to the PACs of ten members of Congress, many of them key members of committees with the power to stop the risky trading that created the multi-billion dollar losses at the federally insured bank this year.

Nine Republicans and one Democrat split $36,000 from JPMorgan Chase & Co. PAC in roughly equal amounts. They were:

• Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID)
• Senator Bob Corker (R-TN)
• Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS)
• Representative John Carney (D-DE)
• Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA)
• Representative Ron Kind (R-WI)
• Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC)
• Representative Steve Stivers (R-OH)
• Representative Scott Garrett (R-NJ)
• Representative Pat Tiberi (R-OH)

[THE NATION]

Bloomberg-

Every once in a while the financial industry lives up to its critics’ worst expectations: that it operates against the interest of the investing public, in cahoots with captive regulators and Washington’s powerful elite.

This is exactly what happened Wednesday, when Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro had to cancel an Aug. 29 vote on sensible new rules to make money-market mutual funds safer. Although Schapiro had the support of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and leading conservative economists, she knew that three of the five commissioners would oppose her. This came after an intensive and often-misleading campaign by the $2.6 trillion money-fund industry to gloss over the inherent instability of the funds.

Among those swayed by the lobbying was Luis Aguilar, a Democratic commissioner (the other is Elisse Walter) who usually sides with Schapiro. Aguilar, a former general counsel of Invesco, one of the country’s major sponsors of money-market funds, met 11 times with industry lobbyists this year. Among his concerns was that additional rules might lead investors to funnel cash into shadowy, unregulated funds.

[BLOOMBERG]

You will never break free until you quit using Banks.

STLTODAY-

Wakita Shaw’s troubles started with a $425 payday loan, the kind of high-interest, short-term debt that seldom ends well for the borrower.

But most of them don’t end up in jail. So Shaw was surprised in May of last year to hear that the St. Louis County police were looking for her. She and her mother went to the police station.

They arrested her on the spot.

They told her the bail was $1,250. “And I couldn’t use a bail bondsman to get out,” Shaw recalled.

The Bill of Rights in the Missouri constitution declares that “no person shall be imprisoned for debt, except for nonpayment of fines and penalties imposed by law.” Still, people do go to jail over private debt. It’s a regular occurrence in metro St. Louis, on both sides of the Mississippi River.

Here’s how it happens: A creditor gets a civil judgment against the debtor. Then the creditor’s lawyer calls the debtor to an “examination” in civil court, where they are asked about bank accounts and other assets the creditor might seize.

[STL TODAY]

The Baltimore Sun-

Reuters-

A former dealer for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC (RBS.L) has provided fresh details on how traders at the British bank tried to influence Libor rates, court documents filed in Singapore show.

Tan Chi Min, who is suing RBS for wrongful dismissal, alleges that the bank’s minutes of his disciplinary meeting held in September last year did not accurately reflect what was discussed and omitted details of conversations about how traders at the bank tried to influence RBS’s interbank lending rate submissions.

More than a dozen banks are currently under investigation by regulators in the United States, Europe and Asia for suspected rigging of the London interbank offered rate (Libor), which is used to price trillions of dollars worth of financial products.

[REUTERS]

Reuters-

Royal Bank of Scotland is expected to agree a settlement in the next two months with U.S. and UK authorities investigating its role in an interest-rate rigging scandal, according to industry sources, regulatory officials and lawyers familiar with the case.

The part-nationalised bank, which is 82 percent-owned by the government, is working towards a settlement early in the fourth quarter, two of the sources said.

Lawyers said it is likely to be the next bank to settle among all of those being pursued by regulators, with the government keen to protect the value of its stake by removing uncertainties over the issue.

“They are state-owned, they are under more pressure than most to deal with this,” said one London-based lawyer connected to Libor cases.

RBS declined to comment.

“We will stand up and take any punishment that comes our way,” Chief Executive Stephen Hester previously told reporters in a briefing following the bank’s half-year results on Aug. 3.

[REUTERS]

Bloomberg-

HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), which is under investigation by U.S. regulators for laundering funds of sanctioned nations including Iran and Sudan, is in talks to settle the matter, two people with knowledge of the case said.

The bank, Europe’s largest by market value, made a $700 million provision in July for any U.S. fines after a Senate Committee found it had given terrorists and drug cartels access to the U.S. financial system. That sum might increase, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver has said.

An HSBC settlement regulators and the Manhattan District Attorney were aiming to conclude as early as September may have been slowed when New York’s banking superintendent accused Standard Chartered of laundering $250 billion for Iran. Regulators had been talking with both banks about universal accords when Benjamin Lawsky on Aug. 6 threatened to revoke Standard Chartered’s license. Deals with the London-based banks next month are still possible, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the investigations are confidential.

[HSBC]

Viewpoint-

In this “Viewpoint” Web exclusive, Matt Taibbi, contributing editor for Rolling Stone, talks about how the lack of any individual prosecutions relating to the 2008 financial crisis has emboldened Wall Street. Taibbi recently took to task Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice for failing to bring any cases against Goldman Sachs in a Rolling Stone piece.

“I’ve heard this over and over again from people who work on Wall Street: that the reason that these guys do what they do so brazenly is because they have absolutely no fear of punishment anymore,” Taibbi says. “Even if they do fine the companies, which they have done often enough — well, not often enough — but they have done often in the last few years, there’s been almost not a single instance of an individual suffering in any way for any of this stuff.”

[VIEWPOINT]

Truth-Out

The cover-up of the death of an anti-corruption whistleblower by numerous agencies and the mainstream media.

In the months following the February killing of Trayvon Martin, that story dominated headlines across the nation and around the world. Mainstream media venues have dedicated thousands of hours and countless pages to every conceivable angle of the story – including baseless speculation about unverified facts and even the imagined motivations of the victim and killer.

Why has this story generated such intense attention and passion?

While a racially charged debate continues among people speculating about the as-yet-unknown circumstances of the killing, the substantive story here is one of national importance: the fact that an American police department utterly failed to investigate a killing and released the killer solely on the basis of his own word.

The ramification of this case is that an American citizen can be killed and that law enforcement can simply neglect their responsibility to investigate the killing, thus failing both to serve justice and to deter future incidents.

Protection by law enforcement and a criminal justice system is the most fundamental contract between a people and their government. Without security, all other rights and liberties are moot, so we employ our government to protect us from being robbed, injured or killed by anyone with the inclination to harm us.

Sheu, the New York Police Department’s Own Trayvon Martin Case

…

[TRUTH-OUT]

Sunny Sheu. (Photo: Nate Adams / The Black Star News)

Kudos to this Judge for doing the absolute right thing.

WTVR-

A Hopewell circuit court judge has ordered that a Marine veteran detained over anti-government Facebook posts be released from a psychiatric hospital.

CBS 6 News’ Catie Beck said the Judge Allan Sharrett dismissed the case Thursday against Brandon Raub. The judge said the original petition for Raub’s detention contained no facts. In other words, there was no information on why Raub was being held — and the judge deemed this violated his civil liberties.

As a result, the judge ruled the government had no grounds to hold Raub.

Beck said the judge is in the process of writing an order for Raub’s release. He is has been released from the hospital in Salem, Virginia Thursday afternoon and is headed home to Chesterfield.

[WTVR]

Gawker-

Mitt Romney’s $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the two years of partial tax returns(one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade.

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama’s fiscal approach and his money managers’ embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren’t made until years after he left the company.

[GAWKER]

AG Also Continues Push For Fannie And Freddie To Implement Principal Forgiveness

BOSTON – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be required to offer commercially reasonable loan modifications under Massachusetts’ recently passed loan modification statute, Attorney General Martha Coakley stated today in a letter sent to the government sponsored mortgage giants. In the letter, Coakley also continued to urge FHFA to reconsider its position and engage in principal reduction for struggling borrowers. 

The letter was sent today to Edward J. DeMarco, Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The Massachusetts law, signed by Governor Deval Patrick on August 3, requires creditors to take commercially reasonable steps to avoid foreclosure upon certain mortgage loans. Recently, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), that manages Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, officially refused to practice principal forgiveness.

“We expect Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, like all creditors, to comply with these statutory obligations as they conduct business in Massachusetts,” AG Coakley said in the letter.  “Specifically, we expect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will pursue common-sense loan modifications for borrowers when the economic benefits of a modified loan exceed the significant losses anticipated at foreclosure.  These loan modifications are critical to assisting distressed homeowners, avoiding unnecessary foreclosures, and restoring a healthy economy in our Commonwealth.”

The letter both highlights the imperative nature of preventing unnecessary foreclosures and FHFA’s steadfast refusal to use principal reduction as a critical foreclosure avoidance tool.

[MASS.gov]

[ipaper docId=103735081 access_key=key-1c64gi6it5gi96nukrsu height=600 width=600 /]

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

August 22, 2012

As the 2012 presidential candidates prepare their closing arguments to America’s middle class, they are courting a group that has endured a lost decade for economic well-being. Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some—but by no means all—of its characteristic faith in the future.

These stark assessments are based on findings from a new nationally representative Pew Research Center survey that includes 1,287 adults who describe themselves as middle class, supplemented by the Center’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Fully 85% of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living. Of those who feel this way, 62% say “a lot” of the blame lies with Congress, while 54% say the same about banks and financial institutions, 47% about large corporations, 44% about the Bush administration, 39% about foreign competition and 34% about the Obama administration. Just 8% blame the middle class itself a lot.

[…]

The Atlantic Cities-

Nearly five years after the market came crashing down, America’s housing market is beginning to show signs of recovery. Sales of previously-occupied homes have been tracking upward, as have prices.  

And according to data released today by the by real-estate website Zillow, the share of homeowners who are “underwater” is also starting to slowly improve. The Zillow data tracks the percent of homeowners with negative equity — that is, those who owe more than their homes are worth — and the dollar amount of that negative equity for the United States as a whole and for its metro regions.

While the amount of negative equity declined by $42 billion in the second quarter this year, it remained a whopping $1.15 trillion. Of all homeowners, 15.3 million (30.9 percent) remained underwater in the second quarter, though this was down from 15.7 million homeowners or 31.4 percent in the first quarter.

[THE ATLANTIC CITIES]

Map courtesy of Zara Matheson, data courtesy of Zillow.