An outstanding read as always by the uncompromisable
Matt Taibbi
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
Showing posts with label Matt Taibbi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Taibbi. Show all posts
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
An outstanding read as always by the uncompromisable
Matt Taibbi
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611?RS_show_page=0
A MUST READ!
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and labyrinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke
A MUST READ!
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and labyrinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke
WHERE ARE THE INDICTMENTS?
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=171936
WAKE THE FUCK UP AMERICA!
When a reporter can no longer report
You no longer have a CONSTITUTIN!
TARP and the statute of limitations is a very interesting point concerning the cover up to.
If you don't start hitting the streets America and showing your anger over being raped by the Investment Banking Industry as well as your Governments own collusion of it,
YOU will loose any sense of freedoms you ever had!
And become nothing more than a slave that serves the MACHINE!
Matt Taibbi blows the door off the entire Foreclosuregate scam with yet another article.....
In one case handled by Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, a homeowner refinanced her house in 2005 but almost immediately got into trouble, going into default in December of that year. Yet somehow, this woman's loan was placed into a trust called Home Equity Loan Trust Series AE 2005-HE5 in January 2006 — five months after the deadline for that particular trust. The loan was not only late, it was already in foreclosure — which means that, by definition, whoever the investors were in AE 2005-HE5 were getting shafted.
Why does stuff like this matter? Because when the banks put these pools together, they were telling their investors that they were putting their money into tidy collections of real, performing home loans. But frequently, the loans in the trust were complete ****. Or sometimes, the banks didn't even have all the loans they said they had. But the banks sold the securities based on these pools of mortgages as AAA-rated gold anyway.
Right. So what's the bottom line?
In short, all of this was a scam — and that's why so many of these mortgages lack a true paper trail. Had these transfers been done legally, the actual mortgage note and detailed information about all of these transactions would have been passed from entity to entity each time the mortgage was sold. But in actual practice, the banks were often committing securities fraud (because many of the mortgages did not match the information in the prospectuses given to investors) and tax fraud (because the way the mortgages were collected and serviced often violated the strict procedures governing such investments). Having unloaded this diseased cargo onto their unsuspecting customers, the banks had no incentive to waste money keeping "proper" documentation of all these dubious transactions.
The entire thing was and is a scam. I've been blowing the whistle on this for more than three years. There's no interest in stopping it, and most people's eyes glaze over.
But the essence of the scam is this: you were asset-stripped, your money stolen, you were sold an overinflated house, and all of it was an intentional scam.
What's sad is that most Americans who have an opinion about the foreclosure crisis don't give a **** about all the fraud involved. They don't care that these mortgages wouldn't have been available in the first place if the banks hadn't found a way to sell oregano as weed to pension funds and insurance companies.
That's one of the larger uglies in all of this. Not only were you ripped off but worse, the banks who did it not only robbed you once on your house, but robbed your pension fund on the back end!
There's a cynical argument to be made that the entire purpose of TARP and all the other BS pulled by both Obama and Bush was to run the statute of limitations - that is, intentionally delay recognition of the harm until you can't sue to recover any more.
Then there's the attempts to block the public's access to the courts - to observe. A right guaranteed in the Constitution.
Worse, about an hour later, April Charney, the lawyer who accompanied me to court, receives an e-mail from the judge actually threatening her with contempt for bringing a stranger to his court. Noting that "we ask that anyone other than a lawyer remain in the lobby," Judge Soud admonishes Charney that "your unprofessional conduct and apparent authorization that the reporter could pursue a property owner immediately out of Chambers into the hallway for an interview, may very well be sited [sic] for possible contempt in the future."
What part of The Constitution did this DOUCHE NOZZLE not bother to read?
We stand for this? Now we not only have perjury across the board and fraud up and down the line but we also have courtrooms where judges exclude the public in direct contravention of both state and federal Constitutions?
This so-called Judge needs to be imprisoned.
Why don't the banks want us to see the paperwork on all these mortgages? Because the documents represent a death sentence for them. According to the rules of the mortgage trusts, a lender like Bank of America, which controls all the Countrywide loans, is required by law to buy back from investors every faulty loan the crooks at Countrywide ever issued. Think about what that would do to Bank of America's bottom line the next time you wonder why they're trying so hard to rush these loans into someone else's hands.
The banks are insolvent. Bankrupt. Kaput. Period.
We're beyond Banana Republic stage - this is well into the realm where the looters are now employing as many hired guns as they can find in a puerile attempt to cover their tracks and continue to cover up the original looting with more looting!
The only remaining question is why the public sits still for this obviously outrageous behavior, and when we will see the general public rise off their couches, turn off Dancing With The Stars, demand that this crap stop and the institutions involved be shut down and broken up with their executives subject to investigation, prosecution and imprisonment.
WAKE THE FUCK UP AMERICA!
When a reporter can no longer report
You no longer have a CONSTITUTIN!
TARP and the statute of limitations is a very interesting point concerning the cover up to.
If you don't start hitting the streets America and showing your anger over being raped by the Investment Banking Industry as well as your Governments own collusion of it,
YOU will loose any sense of freedoms you ever had!
And become nothing more than a slave that serves the MACHINE!
Matt Taibbi blows the door off the entire Foreclosuregate scam with yet another article.....
In one case handled by Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, a homeowner refinanced her house in 2005 but almost immediately got into trouble, going into default in December of that year. Yet somehow, this woman's loan was placed into a trust called Home Equity Loan Trust Series AE 2005-HE5 in January 2006 — five months after the deadline for that particular trust. The loan was not only late, it was already in foreclosure — which means that, by definition, whoever the investors were in AE 2005-HE5 were getting shafted.
Why does stuff like this matter? Because when the banks put these pools together, they were telling their investors that they were putting their money into tidy collections of real, performing home loans. But frequently, the loans in the trust were complete ****. Or sometimes, the banks didn't even have all the loans they said they had. But the banks sold the securities based on these pools of mortgages as AAA-rated gold anyway.
Right. So what's the bottom line?
In short, all of this was a scam — and that's why so many of these mortgages lack a true paper trail. Had these transfers been done legally, the actual mortgage note and detailed information about all of these transactions would have been passed from entity to entity each time the mortgage was sold. But in actual practice, the banks were often committing securities fraud (because many of the mortgages did not match the information in the prospectuses given to investors) and tax fraud (because the way the mortgages were collected and serviced often violated the strict procedures governing such investments). Having unloaded this diseased cargo onto their unsuspecting customers, the banks had no incentive to waste money keeping "proper" documentation of all these dubious transactions.
The entire thing was and is a scam. I've been blowing the whistle on this for more than three years. There's no interest in stopping it, and most people's eyes glaze over.
But the essence of the scam is this: you were asset-stripped, your money stolen, you were sold an overinflated house, and all of it was an intentional scam.
What's sad is that most Americans who have an opinion about the foreclosure crisis don't give a **** about all the fraud involved. They don't care that these mortgages wouldn't have been available in the first place if the banks hadn't found a way to sell oregano as weed to pension funds and insurance companies.
That's one of the larger uglies in all of this. Not only were you ripped off but worse, the banks who did it not only robbed you once on your house, but robbed your pension fund on the back end!
There's a cynical argument to be made that the entire purpose of TARP and all the other BS pulled by both Obama and Bush was to run the statute of limitations - that is, intentionally delay recognition of the harm until you can't sue to recover any more.
Then there's the attempts to block the public's access to the courts - to observe. A right guaranteed in the Constitution.
Worse, about an hour later, April Charney, the lawyer who accompanied me to court, receives an e-mail from the judge actually threatening her with contempt for bringing a stranger to his court. Noting that "we ask that anyone other than a lawyer remain in the lobby," Judge Soud admonishes Charney that "your unprofessional conduct and apparent authorization that the reporter could pursue a property owner immediately out of Chambers into the hallway for an interview, may very well be sited [sic] for possible contempt in the future."
What part of The Constitution did this DOUCHE NOZZLE not bother to read?
We stand for this? Now we not only have perjury across the board and fraud up and down the line but we also have courtrooms where judges exclude the public in direct contravention of both state and federal Constitutions?
This so-called Judge needs to be imprisoned.
Why don't the banks want us to see the paperwork on all these mortgages? Because the documents represent a death sentence for them. According to the rules of the mortgage trusts, a lender like Bank of America, which controls all the Countrywide loans, is required by law to buy back from investors every faulty loan the crooks at Countrywide ever issued. Think about what that would do to Bank of America's bottom line the next time you wonder why they're trying so hard to rush these loans into someone else's hands.
The banks are insolvent. Bankrupt. Kaput. Period.
We're beyond Banana Republic stage - this is well into the realm where the looters are now employing as many hired guns as they can find in a puerile attempt to cover their tracks and continue to cover up the original looting with more looting!
The only remaining question is why the public sits still for this obviously outrageous behavior, and when we will see the general public rise off their couches, turn off Dancing With The Stars, demand that this crap stop and the institutions involved be shut down and broken up with their executives subject to investigation, prosecution and imprisonment.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The pawning of America piece by piece courtesy of the Investment banks
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/222206?RS_show_page=0
Here's a must read by Matt Taibbi
for Rolling Stone.
Matt exposed Goldman Sach's for the blood sucker it is and now brings to you in fine detail the pawning of America for a few billion bucks.
Raped raw ain't the word for it.
I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ."
I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?"
He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you know about this?"
As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.
There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.
America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over
Here's a must read by Matt Taibbi
for Rolling Stone.
Matt exposed Goldman Sach's for the blood sucker it is and now brings to you in fine detail the pawning of America for a few billion bucks.
Raped raw ain't the word for it.
I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ."
I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?"
He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you know about this?"
As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.
There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.
America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over
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