How is the GOP Like a Bank? Maher

 

Maher Says GOP Like Banks: “They Will Not Give A Black Man Credit”

HBO host Bill Maher said the GOP was like banks when it came to the death of Gaddafi. “They’re like the banks, they will not give a black man credit!” he told his “Real Time” audience.

“I gotta tell you, these Republicans, they will not give credit. They, they talked about this yesterday. They gave credit to the rebels, and to the British, and to the French. They would not mention the president. It was like they were on a game show and the password was ‘Obama.’ They are like the banks. They will not give a black man credit.”

Take Back the Land

Recently departed Jazz Musician Gill Scott Heron’s seminal piece was a song called “Winter in America”. I think Gill Scott saw the destruction of the American Dream years before it reached the crisis point.

Something is really, really wrong here – and other than a few intrepid groups like “Take Back the Land” – there doesn’t seem to be anyone in power doing a damn thing about it.

The right wing in this country is spending a lot of time defending the banks, the major corporations, and the rich by foisting one Trojan Horse issue after another upon the public airwaves.

A $15 a year tax break isn’t going to save you from being foreclosed on your house.

Protesters ‘Liberate’ Foreclosed Homes

When Virginia Henry bought her boarded-up and abandoned Rochester, N.Y., home in December 2007, she saw potential where others were blind to it. The house, a short sale, became her home to live in and care for, she said. She plopped down her $20,000 and filed her paperwork for a loan program that would pay the balance — $43,000 — to rehabilitate the property.

But what followed was a series of unanswered calls and letters to Bank of America, Henry says, eventually culminating in her arrest Friday for a charge of trespassing on her own front lawn. The arrest, like much of this story, is the source of a dispute. Henry asserts police officers shoved her to the ground during the arrest, police claim she fainted from the intense heat. She has a court date for the trespassing charge July 28.

The facts of the short sale are also at issue. The bank has told Henry that the short sale never closed and that the house at 5 Appleton St. — with all her worldly possessions trapped inside — is no longer hers. A Bank of America spokeswoman, Jumana Bauwens, said she would investigate the claims.

“This is my home,” Henry told AOL Real Estate in a phone interview after the arrest. “How can I be trespassing in my own home?”

Protesters Step In

Highway Robbery

Wells Fargo is the first of several banks to face the wrath of consumers in class action lawsuits resultant of their abuses of fees related to consumer checking accounts. In an influential California case Wells Fargo has been ordered to pay $203 Million in restitution. Other major banks are on the chopping block in a national case. The shady practice of artificially arraigning the sequence of debits to an account to maximize the number and amount of penalties brutalizes consumers on fixed incomes, and consumers already at risk, adding hundreds of dollars a month in penalties to a downward spiral. This really should be treated as a criminal enterprise.

Old Time Highway Robbery, same as the New Highway Robbery... Except It's Now Done By the Bank

Wells Fargo faces larger suit on overdraft fees

A San Francisco judge’s scathing ruling ordering Wells Fargo to pay its customers $203 million for manipulating debit transactions to maximize overdraft fees might be just the start of troubles for the bank.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s 90-page opinion Tuesday described Wells Fargo’s motive as profiteering and said the San Francisco-based bank’s goal was to “maximize the number of overdrafts and squeeze as much as possible” out of customers.

But the hefty tab represents only what Wells owes its California customers. That figure is far smaller than the potential bill from a separate suit in which Wells’ clients in other states have accused the bank of the same unfair practices.

That case, consolidated in federal court in Miami, includes similar claims against 30 other lending institutions, including Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, Union Bank and U.S. Bank.

The crux of the claims is that the banks processed debit transactions from the largest to the smallest, instead of the order in which they occurred, depleting accounts faster and boosting the number of overdrafts, which cost as much as $35 per transaction.

Wells Fargo garnered more than $1.4 billion in overdraft fees just in California from 2005 to 2007, according to court documents. Nationwide, banks and credit unions collected almost $24 billion in overdraft fees in 2008, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

Wells Fargo, which continues to follow the “high-low” practice that it has had in place since 1998, said it would appeal Alsup’s decision. Wells representatives declined to forecast what the ruling might mean in the Florida matter, other than to say that the California order was not in line with the facts and that the bank’s transactions have been “consistent with the laws and rules of governing regulatory authorities.”

“We have found that high-low gives priority to larger payments and have found that those are the customers’ priority payments … it gives priority to larger transactions,” said Richele Messick, spokeswoman for Wells Fargo.

Messick said that many transactions are received by the bank in a random order without a time stamp, and therefore, the bank needed to determine an order in which to process them.

Finance Reform – President Obama’s Next Priority

I think President Obama is still trying way too hard to get Republicans involved in the business of governing our nation. He seems to believe Republicans really give a damn about the welfare of the country (they don’t), and that at some point they will see the light (they won’t).

Walking Away From the Pain

The New Mortgage Revolution: Walk Away

Underwater on your McMansion? Dump the Mortgage!

Big real estate developers do it all the time – like yesterday, when the owner of New York City’s Stuyvesant Town complex decided to stop paying its $3 billion mortgage. So why are you still writing a check every month on that mortgage that’s much bigger than your home is actually worth?

Good question, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler says. Thaler tells New York Times readers that it’s not just alright to walk away from one’s over-sized mortgage — it may actually be a moral imperative. (An earlier Times article, by Roger Lowenstein, said much the same thing.) After all, lenders had no second thoughts about lending more than many borrowers could afford or than the homes might actually be worth. It’s just not fair to expect borrowers to follow rules that the lenders don’t.

But why stop there? Some commentators are now calling on borrowers to start a mass mortgage strike.
“Remember burning draft cards? Burn your mortgage,” the blog DailyKos told readers recently:

“The real risk to the banks and investors is that the people in those homes might just decide to walk away. And that’s what we must do. Doesn’t have to be everybody, of course; but anyone who finds themselves seriously underwater with no hope of ever recouping their investment….just walk away Renee. Morality has nothing to do with it. You are a cog in the wheel of a machine that is killing this country and if you remain a cog you enable it. Remove your cog and the machine will not keep running. Remove millions of cogs and the machine gets replaced.”

Now the call for a borrowers’ revolt is being joined by folks who know an opportunity when they see it: real estate agents. Over the past month, agents have been rushing to declare 2010 “the year of the strategic default.” Here’s Connecticut Realtor Minna Reid

Loan modifications do not address the real problem of heavy negative equity and are sure to fail most of the time. Even if the homeowner lowers their current payment they are left more trapped than ever. There will be no quick recovery this time. Years later when there is a need to HAVE TO move, the original problem of being upside down remains and the modified homeowner is left to short sell or foreclose once again.

Isn’t it better to just cut the losses upfront ?

I know many will consider strategic default wrong or immoral, but as for me, I stopped passing judgment long ago.

Reid is far from the only real estate agent using mass revolt against the banks as a sales strategy. San Diego broker Bob Schwartz asks, “How many homeowners will suddenly wake up to the fact that their home is now worth tens of thousands of dollars less than their mortgage balance? Only the naive will believe that their San Diego home’s value will bounce back anytime soon…. Defaulting “strategically” can entice more walk-aways by buying all the major items they may need in the near future, such as a car or even a house, right before they take a hike. As long as you stay current with other mortgage lenders, one could potentially have a good credit standing in 2 years after the walk-away.”

Ouch for the banks! But strategically not a bad move.

On Obama and the Politics of Failure

I think the Brown win is finally the catharsis which gets the Obama Administration out of the bipartisan stupidity. Going in to the 2008 election, pragmatic analysts knew it was going to take a ruthless SOB to turn this country around and clean up the mess made by the Bushshits and conservatives. The concern with Obama was that he was far too committed to having a beer across the table – and not rolling out the guillotine and lopping off the appropriate heads.

The Plan going forward

The Mr. Nice Guy approach has failed, in no small part because his opponents are under no such delusions.

Early in the Obama Administration there was an agreement that Dems wouldn’t use their majority power, as Republicans had – to go after the miscreants in the opposing Party and previous Administration. That is why you don’t see the Dick, or the rest of the right-wing mafia and war profiteers in jail. That “mercy syndrome” was extended to the banks and Wall Street as the full depth of depravity under the Bushshit resulted in an economic meltdown.

Since fixing the economy isn’t something that can be done within the election cycle, the oldest political maxim since Egyptian times is to put some blood on the floor so the populace can see their leaders are committed to “justice”. It is way past time for Obama to do this, and in not doing it he has screwed his Party – perhaps irreparably for the next cycle.

Over the next 90 days, expect the banks who created this pain, and are still profiting – to begin to feel a whole bunch of pain.

President Obama looks to tap populist anger

Exclusive: President Obama: We Lost Touch with American People Last Year

Proposal Set to Curb Bank Giants

Expect that the Administration will turn the dogs loose on the Republicans. It is way past time for these criminal conservative scum to meet their just desserts.  Face it, trying to be accommodating to these bastards has only resulted in them spitting in Obama’s face. There simply is no accommodation that can be made with rabid dogs.

Bank None… Move Yo’ Money!

The “move your money” movement gets noticed

Hat Tip – Walletpop

Fat Cat Bankers Stealing Your Money With Hidden Fees

An online media maven is urging Americans to switch banks, and she wants her crusade to go viral. On the Huffington Post website, founder Arianna Huffington introduces what she calls the “move your money” campaign. The idea is to get Americans — all Americans — to close their accounts at big banks and transplant their personal finances to smaller banks. The budding cause has its own web site, moveyourmoney.info, including a link where you can plug in your zip code and find a list of smaller banks.

Huffington singles out the Big Four banks (that would be Bank of America, Citi, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo) for particular ire, pointing out that they’ve curbed business lending even since receiving TARP money. She urges Americans to park their money at community banks instead of these TARP-receiving behemoths.

Since the Congress doesn’t have the political courage to make these fat cat banks walk a straight line, after a series of laws the last 10 years which have allowed unprecedented consolidation and favorable rules vastly tipping credit and banking laws in the banking industry’s favor to the detriment of the public – then it’s up to the American consumer.

Smaller, local banks are hoping to gain your business, and are far more likely to make loans within their local service area, provide services – and not to attempt to derive revenue from outlandish and sometimes flagrantly criminal fees by tricking consumers.  Losing customers, unlike with the big banks, has consequence.

I can’t prove it statistically, as I’ve not seen any figures supporting it – but I have to beieve the trust level between American Consumers and their banks has to be at it’s lowest point since the Great Depression.

Obama Places Another Brick In Rebuilding America

Brick Wall - Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler of ETH Zurich, who used real brick for an installation at the Venice Biennale

Following the course of the Obama Administration for conservatives must be like picturing running beside a brick wall. Just when they think they are going straight…

They smack into a brick wall like the one above.

President Obama wants to create a new consumer financial protection agency to protect consumers from the massive fraud and abuse that has brought our economy low.