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ROME RULES, THE NEW WORLD ORDER
INTERNET, DISINFORMATION TACTICS
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IF YOU ARE A DISINFO AGENT . DONT WASTE TIME LEAVING MESSAGES FOR YOU ARE SOON TO BE FOUND OUT.. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, KNOW YOUR ENEMYS TACTICS, ONLINE ANYONE NOT A DISINFO AGENT LEAVE MESSAGES AND DISCUSS THIS SUBJECT OF HOW THEY OPERATE ON THE INTERNET
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Lyndon LaRouche Obama is 'Clinically Insane!'
Get Obama out of office now before he starts World War Three!
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Alex also talks with political candidate and economist Lyndon LaRouche about his emergency statement released on Thanksgiving evening. It calls for stopping the British empire before its successfully launches World War Three and the destruction of civilization.
http://larouchepac.com/
http://www.infowars.com/
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/
http://www.infowars.com/indefinite-detention-bill-set-for-final-vote-thursday/
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Nearly 100,000 Americans Haven't Collected Their Tax Return: IRS
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Nearly 100,000 Americans Haven't Collected Their Tax Return: IRS
The Internal Revenue service has more than a hundred million dollars it would like to give deserving taxpayers.
Exactly 99,123 taxpayers are owed a total of $153.3 million in tax refunds, but the IRS is unable to give them the money due to various mailing address errors, CNNMoney reports. That sum may be less than 0.01 percent of all refunds handed out, but it's a significant amount for many of the recipients themselves, as the average refund check runs around $1,547.
It's likely a significant number of those not obtaining their tax returns don't have a bank account or rely on a so-called alternative financial institution, according to ABC News. A BankRate.com poll that found Americans most often plan to use tax returns to pay down debt, indicating a degree of financial vulnerability, would seem to support that claim.
These IRS tax returns aren't the only funds sitting unclaimed with the U.S. government, however. In fact, there's roughly $33 billion worth of unclaimed funds sitting in state treasuries and other agencies overall, according to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, MarketWatch reports. In New York, for example, there is $1.7 million that has yet to be claimed by the appropriate individual. But for low-income earners, especially the half of American workers that make less than $27,000 dollars, not obtaining any unclaimed funds is an especially tough blow.
And while nearly half of American tax filers paid no income taxes this year, it's not safe to assume that includes only low- and -middle-income Americans. The IRS earlier this year revealed that 1,470 Americans with incomes of $1 million or more paid nothing in income taxes in 2009. Some billionaires are similarly taxed a rate of less than 1 percent of their incomes.
With the federal deficit an ever-present issue in Washington, calls for higher taxes on the wealthy have grown louder, even from millionaires themselves. In August, Warren Buffett called for higher taxes on the super-rich in a New York Times op-ed, in which he also said he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Most agree with the Oracle of Omaha: 64 percent of Americans support raising taxes on millionaires, according to a recent poll.
In the meantime there are resources available for those who're missing their tax refunds, with every state featuring an online resource for people to find missing funds, MarketWatch reports. Likewise, the IRS offer the "Where's My Refund?" tool on its website, designed to get refunds back to Americans.
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Mortgage Modification Scammers On Notice As Federal Offices Announce Crack Down
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Mortgage Modification Scammers On Notice As Federal Offices Announce Crack Down
With the economy losing momentum and the housing market sagging, there has been no shortage of scammers looking to take advantage of struggling homeowners. Now, three government offices are trying to put an end to it.
The Treasury Department, together with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, announced on Thursday that they will be collaborating on a task force to investigate mortgage modification scams.
The new group will aim to crack down on scammers who offer to help homeowners revise the terms of their mortgages -- but instead collect a fee up front and then never deliver on their promise.
Such scams have become prevalent in the wake of the housing market collapse and subsequent recession. High unemployment and evaporating homeowner wealth have left countless Americans scrambling to make ends meet.
Thousands have turned to the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, a federal initiative meant to offer cash-strapped homeowners a way to modify their mortgages and avoid foreclosure.
But scammers are looking to capitalize on homeowners' desperation. A common tactic is for the scammer to claim some affiliation with HAMP and promise to get the homeowner's debts or monthly payments lowered, in exchange for payment up front.
The homeowner might front the cash, but they never receive the help they're looking for.
A SIGTARP official speaking on background told The Huffington Post that such scams are taking place nationwide, and may be advertised through any number of media -- print, Web, TV, radio and over the phone.
A consumer fraud alert issued by the three offices noted that homeowners can look for certain red flags. Anyone asking for payment up front is probably not on the level. And scammers often say they can "guarantee" a mortgage modification -- even though in reality, only mortgage servicers can authorize these changes, and third parties are unable to make any such guarantees.
The announcement of the joint task force comes only weeks after SIGTARP took similar measures against mortgage modification scams online, when it targeted more than 100 Web sites advertising questionable homeowner-assistance programs on Google, Bing and Yahoo! search result pages.
The number of homeowners looking to revise their mortgages through HAMP reached a 16-month high in September after flagging over the summer. The drop in modification filings may have been due to widespread complaints about the efficiency and effectiveness of the program.
Although HAMP initially set a goal of keeping between three and four million homeowners out of foreclosure, it proved unable to handle the volume of applications. Many modification have been canceled while still in the preliminary stages, and according to SIGTARP estimates, HAMP is now only on track to help about 800,000 homeowners.
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Florida's Forgotten Victims Of Foreclosure: Tenants
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Florida's Forgotten Victims Of Foreclosure: Tenants
MIAMI -- Sergio Palacios doesn't have the typical South Florida foreclosure story.
He doesn't live in a McMansion in some suburban subdivision. He wasn't tricked into a mortgage he couldn't afford. In fact, he doesn't own a home at all. He's a tenant. But for the last five months and counting, Palacios, an unemployed construction worker, has lived in his Liberty City apartment without running water.
Deutsche Bank filed a foreclosure suit against the property's owners in April. As Palacios and his roommate suffered through illness and joblessness, they have slipped out to friends' houses to drink and bathe when they could, and did without when they couldn't.
On Tuesday, in a hearing that lasted less than nine minutes, Florida Eleventh Judicial Circuit Judge Gladys Perez ordered his water turned back on.
"Why are we here if we know the tenants are there?" she asked, a hint of irritation in her voice. Florida law prohibits landlords from simply cutting off utilities, a point which a lawyer for the apartment's owners, Joseph Dolsan and Jean Mervoir, did not dispute.
"Let's do it," Perez continued, "let's get the water back on."
Palacios's saga won't end there. Dolsan and Mervoir have vowed to evict him. But his hearing on Tuesday illustrates one of the hidden undercurrents of the foreclosure crisis: tenants, many who have little or no income, caught in the middle of battles between banks and property owners. The Census's American Community Survey estimates that 345,000 housing units in Miami-Dade County are renter-occupied -- 42 percent of the area's total. An unknown number of those units have been caught up in the area's housing crash.
Some 40 percent of the families nationwide facing eviction due to foreclosure are renters, according to National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates. Many of those foreclosures happen in low-income, non-white communities, where the tenants affected are the least likely to seek legal help or know their rights.
Federal law passed in 2009 creates some protections for tenants, but only once the properties they live in have been formally foreclosed upon. That a process that can often drag out over months.
Palacios's lawyer at Florida Legal Services, Purvi Shah, said she has handled about a dozen similar instances of landlords in foreclosure cutting off utilities in the past year. While statistics about the problem seem to be scarce, she estimates that foreclosure means "dozens if not hundreds of families are living without running water in South Florida."
By and large, she said, her clients live in duplexes, triplexes or other small multi-family residences. They are often properties that "investors purchased at the height of the bubble, thinking they were going to have a good investment property, or that they would be able to flip the property, then got caught in the crash."
"You've got landlords who are living in the middle of foreclosure," Shah said, "allowing their properties to run into the ground."
Foreclosures are often see as two-sided conflicts between banks and mortgagees, leaving tenants forgotten. Shah would like to see more responsibility for maintaining rental properties placed on lenders like Deutsche Bank, but for now there is little legal basis in Florida for actions like that.
Legislation passed in 2009 grants renters the right to stay in their properties for 90 days after a foreclosure has been finalized or throughout the term of their lease, whichever is longer.
"Before, banks always thought that we don't want to be landlords, and nobody can make us landlords," said Kent Qian, a staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project. Generally, he said, some banks don't see the value in collecting rent from only a few tenants when they have to go through the hassle of maintaining properties for them -- "but the federal law makes it clear."
"When you look back at all the federal requirements, who's been required to do what, I'd say that banks with regard to homeowner were required to do little" since the housing crash, said Linda Couch, the National Low Income Housing Coaltion's senior vice president for policy and research. "This is one area where Congress said wait a minute, we truly have a blameless victim here."
Since the foreclosure on his building is still dragging on, Palacio filed a lawsuit against Dolsan and Mervoir to keep the water running.Florida law mandates that tenants' utilities stay connected and residences remain habitable.
"There is no federal legislation that addresses that," said Qian. "So a lot of problems can happen during the foreclosure process, especially when the former landlord, who's not making their payments, skips out on all the other checks as well."
Even when tenants are able to make payments on utilities themselves, they are often confronted with a messy legal and logistical tangle of utility bills and inconsistent laws.
In many states it is difficult for tenants to take over utility payments when their landlords fail to uphold their obligations. Shah, Palacios's lawyer, said a recently passed ordinance should make it easier for Miami tenants to step in -- but that the high deposit fees required will make it difficult for many of her clients to pay up.
Shah would like to see the county step up its code enforcement. She would also like to see more cities and towns "look at this and see what's happening to our communities wholesale."
"Our multifamily properties," Shah said, "are either languishing or no longer serving as healthy safety property."
In the case of Palacios's residence -- a duplex on the county's property register that Shah claimed was illegally subdivided into three units -- everyone seems to agree that the property is languishing. Palacios is withholding his rent over the generally shabby upkeep of his home.
Marlie Condon, the landlords' lawyer, said she would be starting the eviction process almost at the same time as the water was restored.
"We have to," Condon said. "There's not supposed to be anyone in there now. There's problems with the building."
That response, Shah said, would be a "retaliatory eviction" -- which Shah said she'd fight it in court.
Speaking through a court interpreter on Tuesday, Palacios said he was pleased with his incremental victory. "Yes, yes, yes," he said, "very happy."
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Massachusetts AG Lawsuit: Five Major U.S. Banks Accused Of Deceptive Foreclosure Practices
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Massachusetts AG Lawsuit: Five Major U.S. Banks Accused Of Deceptive Foreclosure Practices
WASHINGTON -- Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is suing five of the nation's biggest banks for deceptive foreclosure and mortgage modification practices, her office announced Thursday. Coakley's suit signals her formal departure from ongoing settlement negotiations between those banks, the Obama administration and a coalition of other state AGs over faulty foreclosure procedures.
"The single most important thing we can do to return to a healthy economy is to address this foreclosure crisis," Coakley said in a statement Thursday. "Our suit alleges that the banks have charted a destructive path by cutting corners and rushing to foreclose on homeowners without following the rule of law. Our action today seeks real accountability for the banks illegal behavior and real relief for homeowners."
The lawsuit, filed against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Ally Financial and the Mortgage Electronic Registration System in Suffolk Superior Court, targets banks' using fraudulent paperwork in the foreclosure process, foreclosing without actually holding the mortgage, corrupting the local land recording system and failing to uphold promises of loan modifications.
Until now, Coakley had participated in settlement negotiations led by Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and the Obama administration. The talks kicked off last fall when it came to light banks were using phony documents and forged signatures -- a process dubbed "robo-signing" -- to foreclose on thousands of borrowers.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden became outspoken critics of the talks this summer, insisting Miller sought too narrow a settlement that would release the banks from liability for too much wrongdoing. Miller's focus has been robo-signing and mistreatment of struggling homeowners seeking modifications, but not potential fraud in the way loans were given to borrowers or sold to investors, or in the way banks use MERS to shuffle mortgage documents. The settlement would not encompass the 50 percent of all home mortgages owned by government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to sources close to the talks.
The deal sought by Miller would force the five banks to reform the way the service mortgages and to fork over $25 billion worth of help for homeowners, mostly in the form of principal reductions and modifications. Some who already lost their homes would be eligible for small restitution payments.
Coakley said in a Thursday conference call with reporters that Miller could still reach an agreement, "but it's taken too long and the signals we have received are that we won't get relief that we seek."
In a Thursday statement, Miller said Coakley had told him of her decision. "She also indicated that she'll evaluate the joint state-federal settlement we're negotiating, which we hope to reach soon," Miller said. "Attorney General Coakley indicates that she is open to joining our settlement effort if the terms adequately address the needs of the people of Massachusetts. We're optimistic that we'll settle on terms that will be in the interests of Massachusetts."
Danny Kanner, a spokesman for Schneiderman, praised Coakley in a statement. "Attorney General Schneiderman is encouraged by Attorney General Coakley's action today, and looks forward to their continued work to hold those responsible for the mortgage crisis accountable and provide meaningful relief to struggling homeowners."
Attorneys general in California and Nevada have also distanced themselves from the settlement talks in recent months. In August sources said Coakley was among the AGs pushing for tougher treatment of the banks.
"The lawsuit follows more than a year of negotiations with the banks over a 50-state settlement focused around the issues of fraudulent documents, including 'robo-signing,'" Coakley's office said in its release. "AG Coakley had made clear that she would not sign on to an agreement with the banks if it included broad liability release regarding MERS and other issues or if she did not believe the banks had come to the table with an offer in the best interest of Massachusetts."
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