A Mass ‘Strategic Default’ Movement Begins – Time to Rebel Against Economic Tyranny By Walking Away From Your Mortgage Payments (OpESR)

As a result of fraudulent actions by the “Too Big to Fail” banks, 28% of US homeowners now owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth. A new survey by Fannie Mae found that 27% of American homeowners are considering walking away from their mortgage.
Why should we be forced to pay an overvalued mortgage when it was the big banks who wrecked the housing market? After getting bailed out with trillions of our tax dollars, the big banks are reaping record profits and their executives are giving themselves record bonuses. Meanwhile, as they continue to push home values off a cliff, we are forced to pay for their crimes with outrageous mortgage payments and increased property taxes.
This scandalous exploitation of the American public has to stop. The time is now to strategically default on mortgage payments en masse. A National Mortgage Default Action will begin on the 4th of July. Celebrate your financial Independence by joining this movement here.
Full Call to Action:

“Here we stand on the precipice of financial and spiritual collapse. An economic virus has been allowed to infiltrate the homes of decent and upstanding people which deters us from living the way we would like. There comes a time in all of our lives where we must stand up for ourselves and our livelihoods – not only because of the crisis we are currently facing and the oppression we have been dealt; but for the livelihoods of our children, and the betterment of society as a whole.
Banks have foreclosed on millions of homes throughout the United States. These homes – now empty – were once lived in by everyday people like you and me. These American families have now been cast aside into a crumbling economy.
With long-term unemployment at an all-time high; with an all-time record number of American families now living paycheck-to-paycheck struggling to make ends meet, We The People of this great nation must unite and take our lives back; take back our self-esteem, and take back the glory that has been stolen from us via unethical means from these malicious banking magnates.
As the “Too Big to Fail” banks are bailed out with our hard-earned taxpayer dollars, we are made homeless and to suffer at the hands of tyrants.
We ask you, as the people of America: what will it take to get you to stand up and be the empowered citizen you are?
The time is now! We can be the proud Americans we should be by rising up in spirit, by making a stand and taking action. The action we propose is a mass default on mortgage payments to show these degenerate bankers that they are here to serve the public interest – not to fleece the nation and line their own pockets, while we struggle for bread and milk. In doing so, you will not be alone: there are millions of families who have questions unanswered, and mouths that go unfed.
A stunning 50 percent of US children will use a food stamp during their childhood. Millions of children go hungry in America every night because they are forced to pay an overvalued mortgage. Millions of American children go without health care and medicine because they are forced to pay an overvalued mortgage.
These tyrannical practices can not continue.
We must UNITE and take our money and power back from those that systematically and routinely run us into the gutter. We are reaching out to you in hopes that your own lives have not been tread upon to the point where you no longer have the will to fight for what is good, wholesome, and right. Please consider joining this movement by not paying your mortgage. Show the banks that they do not own us.
We do not need the banks, they need us.
Thank You People of The United States of America for your time and consideration.
Be well and happy!”
- Operation Empire State Rebellion

Let’s Buy Our Government Back From Special Interests – Estimated Cost: $14 Billion

By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
Here’s a thought: let’s buy our Congress back from the special interests who now own it.
We all know special interests own the U.S. Congress and the Federal machinery of governance (i.e. regulatory capture). How much would it cost the American citizenry to buy back their Congress? The goal in buying our Congress back from the banking cartel et al. would not be to compete with the special interests for congressional favors — it would be to elect a Congress which would eradicate their power and influence altogether.
A tall order, perhaps, but certainly not impossible, if we’re willing to spend the money to not just match special interest contributions to campaigns but steamroll them.
A seat in the U.S. Senate is a pricey little lever of power, so we better be ready to spend $50 million per seat. Seats in smaller states will be less, but seats in the big states will cost more, but this is a pretty good average.
That’s $5 billion to buy the Senate.
A seat in the House of Representatives is a lot cheaper to buy: $10 million is still considered a lot of money in this playground of power. But the special interests — you know the usual suspects, the banks, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Tobacco, the military-industrial complex, Big Ag, public unions, the educrat complex, trial lawyers, foreign governments, and so on — will fight tooth and nail to maintain their control of the Federal machinery, so we better double that to $20 million per seat. Let’s see, $20 million times 435….
That’s $8.7 billion to buy the House of Representatives.
It seems we’re stuck with the corporate toadies on the Supreme Court, but the President could scotch the people’s plans to regain control of their government, so we better buy the office of the President, too.
It seems Obama’s purchase price was about $100 million, but the special interests will be desperate to have “their man or woman” with the veto power, so we better triple this to $300 million.
Add these up and it looks like we could buy back our government for the paltry sum of $14 billion. This is roughly .0037% of the Federal budget of $3.8 trillion, i.e. one-third of one percent. That is incredible leverage: $1 in campaign bribes controls $300 in annual spending — and a global empire.
Once we bought back our government, what would be the first items on the agenda? The first item would be to eradicate private bribes, a.k.a. private campaign contributions and lobbying.
If you allow $1 in campaign contributions, then you also allow $10 million. There is no way to finesse bribery, so it has to be cut and dried: no member of Congress can accept any gift or contribution of any nature, monetary or otherwise, and all campaigns will be publicly financed.

Read More: Here

Since 2009, 88 Percent Of Income Growth Went To Corporate Profits, Just One Percent Went To Wages

Sean Savett Jun 30, 2011 

After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:

“Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. …The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented.”

The New York Times adds, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.”
So as average wages fall, and nearly 14 million people remain unemployed, America’s economic recovery has almost entirely benefited corporations. This development adds another chapter to the decline of the middle class, whose incomes are shrinking and wages are stagnating. Last year, top executives’ salaries increased 27 percent, while workers’ salaries increased only 2 percent. At the moment, income inequality in America is the worst it’s been since the 1920s, as the richest 1 percent make nearly 25 percent of the country’s income.
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JPMorgan Scores Victory for Repeat Offenders:

By Jonathan Weil Jun 29, 2011 

Read just about any article in the financial press about a Securities and Exchange Commission settlement with some accused fraudster, and you probably will see two lines bound to get a lot of eyes rolling.
One is that the defendant neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s claims. The other is that the penalties include a court injunction or SEC order barring the alleged crook from breaking the securities laws in the future, as if it had been perfectly legal to violate them beforehand. No one, it seems, ever gets nailed for anything.
As if that weren’t maddening enough, here’s an open secret: The SEC hardly ever enforces these obey-the-law orders. This brings us to last week’s headline-grabbing settlement between the SEC and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s securities arm over a toxic bond deal four years ago called Squared CDO 2007-1.
First, the prologue: In 2006, the SEC fined the same JPMorgan unit $1.5 million after determining it had defrauded customers who bought something called auction-rate securities from the company. Specifically, the SEC accused it of violating section 17(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933, under which the SEC need only show negligence to establish a fraud claim. The SEC also ordered the company not to violate that section of the law in the future.
So what would be the penalty for disobeying that order? Nothing, it turns out.

One More Time

As part of last week’s settlement, the SEC accused the same JPMorgan subsidiary of again violating the same section of the law. However, the commission’s complaint didn’t include any allegation that the company had breached its 2006 cease-and- desist order. An SEC spokesman, John Nester, didn’t offer an answer when asked why not. A JPMorgan spokesman, Joseph Evangelisti, declined to comment.
“This is inexcusable on the part of the SEC not to push this, and it shows how pathetically eager it is to hang up part of the scalp, close an investigation, point to a remedy, and then move on,” says James Cox, a securities-law professor at Duke University School of Law. “They’re just indicating that these orders don’t have any future impact. That’s too bad for the public interest.”
Here’s what the SEC should have done, for appearances’ sake if nothing else. It should have added a claim for violating the 2006 order and fined the company for that infraction separately, even if it kept the total settlement amount the same. Instead, the SEC acted as if the cease-and-desist order never existed, which makes you wonder why the commission bothered to issue it in the first place.

No Names

Under last week’s settlement, which was approved yesterday by a federal judge in New York, JPMorgan will pay $153.6 million. No individuals who worked for JPMorgan were named as defendants, as if the fraud just happened of its own volition. The company also consented to an injunction barring future violations.
Technically, the infractions cited in the 2006 complaint should have disqualified the company from participating in certain kinds of securities offerings. So, back in 2006, JPMorgan asked the SEC’s staff for a waiver that would let it go about its business as usual. (This, too, is standard operating procedure whenever a big securities firm settles an SEC fraud complaint.)
The company got what it wanted, with one catch. The staff wrote that its decision was based on the assumption that JPMorgan “will continue to comply with” the SEC’s cease-and- desist order. The company received two similar waivers from the five-member commission, as well. Don’t count on the SEC to revoke any of those waivers now, though.

Read More: Here

Greece Is a Kleptocracy

Charles Hugh Smith  (June 28, 2011)


Strip away the bailouts and the bogus austerity plans, and the truth is revealed: Greece is a kleptocracy, and the banks and the ECB Eurocrats are both complicit.
 
Despite a veritable flood of financial and political analysis about Greece, nobody seems to have noticed the obvious: Greece is a kleptocracy. Just as a refresher, here is the definition of kleptocracy. Ask yourself is this doesn't fit Greece like a supple leather glove:

Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from the Ancient Greek for "thief" and "rule," is a term applied to a government subject to control fraud that takes advantage of governmental corruption to extend the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. The term means "rule by thieves".

Here is a quote from a first-person report (via Zero Hedge) titled The Ugly Truth:

What angers me and most hard working Greeks is that the common workers are bearing the brunt of the austerity measures while the rich get off scot free. In Greece, if you want to strike it rich, become a specialist dealing with critical life and death decisions, tax collector or a high profile minister in the government. The scandalous stories that are coming out now of doctors, tax collectors, and ministers with millions of euros in their bank accounts and villas in Santorini and Mykonos are no surprise to regular hard-working Greeks.

This is a classic description of a kleptocracy: a financial and political Elite which skims and concentrates the wealth of the nation via corruption and embezzlement while being protected by the winking complicity of their fellow plunderers who hold civil and financial authority.
Here's the real dynamic in Greece: The Kleptocracy--broadly, the political and financial Elites of the nation--saw a stupendous opportunity to embezzle hundreds of billions of euros from greed-blinded European banks at super-low rates of interest.
Being kleptocrats, they sniffed out the basics of the bezzle right away, and have been playing it ever since: we're not paying any of these loans back, so go get the money from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the German taxpayers, or declare bankruptcy. Your choice.
The Greek kleptocrats knew all along that the German, Dutch, French and Finnish taxpayers were easy marks, just as they knew the European Union Power Elites would fall all over themselves to "save the euro" which was the centerpiece of their "one Europe" strategy of domination.
Only the Greek kleptocrats just beat them at their own game. The entire game plan of the "one Europe" Elites depends on nation-states actually complying with non-enforceable codes of conduct and on European banks making prudent loans.
Neither condition held: Greece's Elites reckoned they could game the system and string along the Eurocrats, if not forever, then certainly long enough to engorge their Swiss accounts with euros skimmed from the banks, and they've played that hand to perfection.
Their performance is truly a thing of beauty, a masterful display of the Big Con. Yes, we will agree to austerity, but of course that is only for "the little people." Then, we'll renege on that, and demand another bailout. The Eurocrats will of course comply, lest their own plans for domination crumble along with the euro and the Eurozone edifice.
Meanwhile, the European banks were playing a similiar bezzle. They knew Greece had a history of defaulting on a regular basis, and any employee of the bank who lived in Greece could have briefed them on the kleptocracy's hold on that nation. But the banks knew they could play the Eurocrats and the ECB, too, as the Eurozone had what amounted to a "German Put": if any bad bank loans to Greece ever threatened the Eurozone, the German-led European Central Bank would make them whole.
Once again, the Eurocrats responded as expected, quickly massing hundreds of billions of euros to backstop the impaired loans to Greece and promising that bondholders would not suffer any losses.
The banks and the Greek kleptocracy are like the wife and the mistress of a prominent conservative socialite who absolutely needs to preserve a facade of conventional propriety. The kleptocrats, like the mistress, know they can blow down the entire charade, and so when they demand some baubles (bailouts) from their "Sugar Daddy" European Central Bank, the bank whimpers and complains but forks over the cash, lest the whole shaky facade collapses in a heap, along with the ECB's dominance.
The wife, meanwhile, also gets her demand met. Now that the European banks have leveraged themselves up to pre-implosion Lehman Brothers levels of 30-to-1, they need a bailout, too, and so they tell the ECB, don't even think about saying "no" because massive bank insolvency would also shatter the Euroland's thin veneer of permanence.
The euro system is already broken, but the ECB and its Eurocrats are desperate to maintain the facade. The game is untenable, however, because the Greek kleptocrats and the European banks have all the leverage and the ECB is the bleating mark trying to satisfy the dualing demands of its wife and mistress.
"But you promised." Ah yes, Dearie, but I changed my mind.
It is almost laughable to see the Eurocrats desperately trying to get another "austerity deal" approved, even as everyone involved knows it's as phony as passing off your mistress as your "private secretary." The austerity plan will not actually be put in place, none of the line-in-the-sand fiscal targets will be met, and the Greek kleptocrats will be smirking as the frantic ECB marks scrounge up another bailout and another face-saving "austerity program."
The wild card here is the oppressed Greek citizenry, who might just spoil the fun by overthrowing their corrupt Overlords. They could also spoil the game by simply refusing to play any more, as a General Strike of any length would quash the fantasy of rising taxes and all the rest of the absurd assumptions at the heart of the "austerity program."
If the Eurocrats and the ECB really want to save the euro, then they should help the Greek citizenry evict their kleptocratic Elites. But that would take genuine courage and insight, and alas, the Eurocrats, like all bureaucrats seeking to protect their fiefdom at any cost, don't really care about the oppressed Greeks. They just want to play for time, and hope that a miracle will occur. Even as their fat, sweaty fingers hold a jumble of worthless cards--not even a pair of deuces--they persist in a laughably transparent charade of holding four aces.
The game is over for the ECB, the Greek kleptocracy and the european banks. All that needs to happen now is for the players to reveal their miserable cards and fold. The losses will be stupendous, but they will only get more horrendous the longer the game is allowed to go on.

Govs; Perry and Scott Sneak Off to Vail to Get Their Marching Orders From the Kock Brothers

Govs. Rick Perry And Rick Scott Go AWOL During State Emergencies To Attend Secret Koch Event

By Marie Diamond and Alex Seitz-Wald on Jun 29, 2011 at 4:15 pm

As Texas faced some of the worst wildfires in its history and a severe drought crisis that has caused the federal government to declare the entire state a disaster area, its governor was schmoozing with well-heeled conservative donors in Vail, Colorado at a retreat organized by the right-wing industrialist Koch brothers. Gov. Rick Perry (R) left his state without notifying constituents or the press and dodged inquiries into his whereabouts. The media had to resort to tracking the tail number of a private plane owned by one of Perry’s major campaign donors. “This was an opportunity to talk about the economic success in Texas,” a spokesperson said, denying that the trip had anything to do with a potential presidential run.
Perry has spent the past two months complaining that the Obama administration has not been paying enough attention to his state’s fires.
Meanwhile, in Florida, days after declaring a state of emergency for his state’s own climate crisis, Gov. Rick Scott (R) disappeared over the weekend, failing to disclose his whereabouts in his public schedule and refusing to respond to numerous press inquiries. Yesterday, Scott finally admitted he left the state without informing his constituents to attend the the Koch summit. Florida press spent most of the past few days trying to track down the rogue governor while more than 300 wildfires continue to burn in the state:

​We finally have an answer as to where Gov. Rick Scott was this weekend, and it confirms our suspicion: at the billionaire Koch brothers’ secret conference outside Vail, Colorado.
St. Petersburg Times reporter Alex Leary got the information out of him, a day after the governor’s spokesman wouldn’t confirm or deny whether Scott was there.
“I told anybody who asked me,” the governor told the Times, apparently ignoring the fact that he spends most of his days playing hide-and-seek from the media.

For the first time since he took office, Scott’s public schedule was empty this past weekend, leading most to assume he was trying to conceal his attendance at the Koch event. Scott eventually admitted that he addressed attendees at the retreat, but was vague about what he said.
The Koch brothers host a few of these gatherings each year to bring together conservative lawmakers and corporate titans to discuss their agenda and raise money for political groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-funded enterprises. A January retreat in California reportedly raised $49 million for conservative campaigns.
Koch Industries spent $1.2 million helping elect Republican governors in 2010 alone, and have spent millions more pushing their radical anti-union, anti-health care agenda in the states. In response, the AFL-CIO published a guide called “8 Signs Your Governor Has A Koch Problem.” Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) also attended the Koch event.

Eric Cantor's glaring conflict of interest

He's the GOP's chief debt ceiling negotiator. He's also invested in a fund that will skyrocket if there's a default

By Jonathan Easley

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Eric Cantor

When Eric Cantor shut down debt ceiling negotiations last week, it did more than just rekindle fears that the U.S. government might soon default on its debt obligations -- it also brought him closer to reaping a small financial windfall from his investment in a mutual fund whose performance is directly affected by debt ceiling brinkmanship.

Read More: Here