Pay by Debit Card is Legal Wage Theft

Starting in January, Kentucky state government is going to punish all its employees who make too little money to afford a bank account by paying them with Chase Bank debit cards - cards that could subtract as much as $50 a month from the employees' pay for the privilege of being forced to get paid by credit card.

Down with Tyranny:

This really sucks. From this report (last week) by the NY Times's Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Stephanie Clifford:

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.

For these largely hourly workers, paper paychecks and even direct deposit have been replaced by prepaid cards issued by their employers. Employees can use these cards, which work like debit cards, at an A.T.M. to withdraw their pay.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

And they offer some cases in point, like that of 21-year-old Milwaukee McDonald's employee Devote Yates, who "says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card," and says, "It’s pretty bad. There’s a fee for literally everything you do."

SNIP

As you could surely have imagined, the use of these cards didn't come about for the convenience of workers. It saves companies money, and that's all that matters.

This sounds like a job for Elizabeth Warren. Or riots in the streets.

Steve M:

Do you know what we really need? We need an angry mob with torches and pitchfork marching on the Hamptons, or wherever the hell the scumbags responsible for this system frolic and gambol.

Seriously, what we need is a genuinely populist political leader who makes this sort of thing a top priority -- not whining about the deficit, or about the existence of the Fed, or about big government, or hemp still being illegal, but about ordinary people being screwed.

And that political leader needs to be someone who connects with heartlanders -- which means I'm not talking about Elizabeth Warren, alas. I think Warren could connect with heartlanders, but she's been too nice, too polite, not sufficiently egotistical or ambitious. She lacks the vaulting ambition of Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot or Ron Paul or Ted Cruz. She connects with Massachusetts residents and with the residents of that Portlandia of the mind known as culturally sophisticated liberal America (i.e., you and me). She's still a boutique taste. (Most of our heroes are -- Wyden, Feingold, and Grayson among the pols, Maddow and even Ed Schulz among the media types, etc., etc.)

Somebody has to get the word out to Middle Americans that it doesn't have to be this way. No national figure has done that, and there's no sign of any such national figure on the horizon. But we're screwed until "real Americans" are awakened, or wake up on their own.

Kentucky's Personnel Cabinet claims the Chase debit cards will have no user fees at Chase ATMs. Really? Anybody know how many Chase ATMs there are in the hollows of Morgan County? Among the shuttered storefronts of downtown Covington? Along the undeveloped roads near the Mississippi River?

None, is my guess.  And the Commonwealth of Kentucky - in cahoots with Chase Bank - is committing wage theft.

Kentucky Bankers Association Hates Sen. Elizabeth Warren, As Well They Should

Because she's on to the motherfuckers and she's going to put a stop to their criminal enterprise.

Digby:

Here is an excellent profile of Elizabeth Warren in today's LA Times. Seems she's causing quite a bit of agitation among the financial elites. I couldn't be more delighted:

The attention Warren is drawing — video clips of her first Banking Committee hearing went viral on YouTube — could catapult her even further. Some liberals have begun touting her as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.

"She has maximized the influence and attention that a freshman senator can get," said Jaret Seiberg, a senior policy analyst with financial services firm Guggenheim Partners. "Now, when we look at issues of too-big-to-fail and of consumer protection, people want to know what Elizabeth Warren has to say."

The fast start by Warren, one of the few politicians to embrace the Occupy Wall Street movement, has confirmed the fears of some in the financial industry that she wouldn't hesitate to criticize them from her new, higher-profile position.

Warren's sharp rhetoric is "certainly harmful to our industry," said Ballard Cassady, president of the Kentucky Bankers Assn.

Oh, boo fucking hoo. The poor put-upon bankers and master of the universe just cannot get a break. Well, except for their ill-gotten billions, but other than that it's been just hell.

I am hearing lots of "questions" from establishment liberals about Warren's aggressive style being unhelpful because it's ginning up populist resentment (and lord knows, we can't have that!) My answer to that is, "yeah, whatever." The centrist Democrat experiment in "market liberalism" and appeasement politics has been shown to be an epic failure. We are on the verge of losing the American middle class and have succeeded in growing poverty. Well done, all around.

It's time to change direction and Warren is one of the few who both personally understands the issues and the politics of this new era. If that doesn't go down well among many of those who have invested their lives in the idea that left populism is dirty (or even that straight-up liberalism is a big fat political loser) well, too bad. As far as I'm concerned, she is the future. Get on board or get out of the way.

Sex, Money and Moralists

From Divine Irony:

"Conservative moralists don’t want women to have control over their bodies or same-sex couples to marry, but they don’t give a hoot about billionaires taking over our democracy for personal gain or big bankers taking over our economy. Yet these violations of public morality are far more dangerous to our society because they undermine the public trust that’s essential to both our democracy and economy."

 - Robert Reich (via azspot) (via azspot)

Arrogant Motherfuckers

Yes, of course I'm talking about that most arrogant subset of the rich: Wall Street banksters.

Digby:

Thank you Bernie

.... for saying it:

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came to Capitol Hill this week to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As Congress and the White House are negotiating a year-end deficit deal, Blankfein sought to “lower people’s expectations” about their retirement and health care. He spoke with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year.

“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system and now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working families,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a Senate floor speech.

U.S. Banksters Worse Than Cyprus

 There really is just no category in which the U.S. too-big-to-fail whales are not the worst in the world.

Down with Tyranny:

The NY Times had the question of the day:

Would you have been better off leaving your money in a bank in the United States or in Cyprus over the last five years?

The answer: You would have been better off in Cyprus, even after the bailout, when your money was “confiscated.” If you had 100,000 euros in a Cypriot bank account over the last five years, where the interest rate has averaged about 5 percent, you would have about 127,600 euros today. Even after the bailout, which would require you to give up 10 percent of your deposit-- 12,760 euros-- you would be left with 114,840 euros. The American bank? The $100,000 you deposited at Bank of America five years ago is about $105,100, at the going rate of about 1 percent interest a year.

Wells Fargo Murdered Disabled Veteran

No, that's not hyperbole. Those motherfuckers are on the verge of taking the corporate criminal crown away from Exxon-Mobil.

Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

A bank foreclosure can be a horrifically stressful event on a young and healthy person. But imagine coping with a bank trying to take away your home because of a typo on their part, and not any fault of your own, when you are a frail, disabled veteran. That's the battle 62-year-old Larry Delassus had to fight even though court records show he paid his mortgage two months ahead of schedule and also paid his property taxes in advance.

Via:

On the morning of Dec. 19, 2012, in a Torrance courtroom, Larry Delassus' heart stopped as he watched his attorney argue his negligence and discrimination case against banking behemoth Wells Fargo.

His death came more than two years after Wells Fargo mistakenly mixed up his Hermosa Beach address with that of a neighbor in the same condo complex. The bank's typo led Wells Fargo to demand that Delassus pay $13,361.90 ­— two years of late property taxes the bank said it had paid on his behalf in order to keep his Wells Fargo mortgage afloat.

But Delassus, a quiet man who suffered from the rare blood-clot disorder Budd-Chiari syndrome and was often hospitalized, didn't owe a penny in taxes. 

One of his neighbors, whose condo "parcel number" was two digits different from Delassus', owed the back taxes.

In a series of painfully tragic events, Wells Fargo relied on its typographical error to double Delassus' mortgage — from $1,237.69 to $2,429.13 — as its way of recouping the $13,361.90 in taxes Delassus didn't owe. Delassus, a retiree living on a $1,655 check, couldn't meet the mysteriously increased mortgage. He stopped paying, and soon was far behind on his mortgage.

One especially difficult moment during his battle with Wells Fargo came in May 2011, shortly after another bad bout of illness, Delassus' condo was sold by the bank. In a videotaped court deposition later, Delassus breaks down crying. "I came back from the hospital, and that very day, they sold the son of a b*tch," he says. "I'm homeless. I did not have a home. My condo — 16 years, gone. Gone."

There's much more on Larry Delassus' battle with Wells Fargo here.

Once Wells Fargo had acknowledged their typographical error, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason that they didn't bend over backwards to return Mr. Delassus to square one with his mortgage...the 16-year mortgage holder who never missed a payment, and return him to that point with all the erroneously tacked on fees wiped away.

Delassus' attorney Anthony Trujillo, a friend and next-door neighbor, recalls deposing Wells Fargo Litigation Support Manager Michael Dolan in 2012, and asked what his definition of “fair” was.

“Fair is a place where they have ponies and merry-go-rounds,” Dolan said.

 As always, the scandal is not what's illegal; the scandal is what's legal.

Where the Banksters Have to Pay Something

In the U.S. not only can't we put admitted criminal banksters in jail, we can't even make them pay their fair share in taxes.

 

But in Ecuador, President Correa passes legislation that raises taxes on financial sector to finance a "Human Development Bond" 

 

Watch the video.

To Protect and to Serve

In case you were still under the impression that our militarized local police forces work for the taxpayers instead of criminal corporations and parasite billionaires, here's an illustration of how law enforcement abuses helpless citizens at the behest of the rich.

Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

This may well be a new low for a bank. On the morning of October 10, 2012, Niko Black was in bed when her front door was kicked open by the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Black, who has terminal cancer, crawled to her wheelchair as four-to-six deputies entered and proceeded to hold a gun to her face. She was then taken outside without any of her medication. When she called the Garden Grove Police, they did nothing. Since all of her medication and other means of treatment were in her home, Black began to have difficulty breathing, and very quickly and had to be taken to the hospital.

Via:

The 37-year-old Mescalero Apache woman, who suffers from a rare, malignant and metastatic form of cancer, refused to open the door, saying that they had no legal right to be there. On the other side was a taped copy of a court order obtained from Federal Bankruptcy Judge Theodore C. Albert in late August that she firmly believes should have prevented the OCSD from carrying out the eviction. The deputies acted anyway.

"They break down my door," Black recounts. "I'm sitting there in my wheel chair. I'm about 100 pounds of shriveled-up cancer and a threat to no one."

What came next, she says, was much more harrowing. "Sergeant Bob Sima puts a gun to my face, finger on the trigger, no safety and walks around me," Black states, pausing to emotionally gather herself. "There's no reason, except for to threaten my life, for an intimidation factor, to put a gun to my head."

With neighbors lining up outside watching, Black's health began to worsen. "I needed my medication, I couldn't breathe and I was having a seizure," she said, claiming that deputies were unresponsive to concerns about her condition; one officer even remarked that she 'looked good' to him. An ambulance finally arrived at her friend's behest and she was forcibly removed from her home and hospitalized.

If this situation weren't complicated enough, according to an online petition circulating in support of Black, she never even had a mortgage with Wells Fargo!

Since the eviction, Federal Judge Theodore C. Albert (who signed the court order favoring Black) has ordered Wells Fargo and county representatives to appear in court on November 13 to explain the eviction.

 No need to privatize public safety: the rich already own it.

Bankers Are Just Misunderstood Philanthropists

I don't care if she hadn't made a dime in payments for 10 fucking years; this is a crime. Every executive at that bank should be in prison.

Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

A Phoenix, Arizona woman is taking on two mortgage giants, Bank of America and Fannie Mae, and the case is making its way through federal court. Lilly Washington is representing herself, and seeking ownership of her home and compensation for belongings that were thrown out when her home was wrongfully foreclosed.

Washington was in the middle of a loan modification with Bank of America when her son who is in the military was wounded and sent to a hospital in Germany. She informed the bank that she needed to go be with her son, and BoA assured her in a letter that they were aware of her trip and: "will await your return so that we can finish the loan modification process." She thought everything would be fine until her return.

But just days after leaving, the bank foreclosed, and Fannie Mae took ownership of her home:

Via:

"Everything was empty. Everything. Upstairs, downstairs everything was empty," says Lilly Washington.

Washington was stunned when she returned home and found a "for sale" sign in her yard. She managed to get back into the home and immediately started making calls.

"I said 'where did you put my stuff from the house. Which storage.' They said, 'we don't put in storage, it is at the city dump.'"

Washington had just returned from visiting her wounded son in Germany. She was gone for a month and half. Her son's Purple Heart was thrown away too.

"I said, my gosh how can you take that. He is fighting for this country. And you steal from his home, everything," says Washington.

Washington's church helped her refurnish the home as she wasn't able to recover any of her belongings, and she has been fighting for two years now to regain ownership.

"Wall Street Reform is About Making This Economy Stronger for You"

Possibly in reaction to J.P. Morgan losing $3 billion on the bank equivalent of slot machines, repugs in the Senate approved two nominees to the Federal Reserve. That makes this week's appeal from President Obama to Congress to do something slightly less than usually ludicrous.



Full transcript here:

Occupy Detroit's Success

This is how you build a movement that makes a difference.

Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars:

Digital journalist Bob Plain documents the next phase of Occupy Detroit:

Nowhere in America needs to be occupied more than the Motor City.
...

The idea sprung from two occupiers who started sleeping in an abandoned home on Golden Gate Street in northeast Detroit, where at least half the homes have been literally abandoned. Not even boarded up in many cases. Just left for the taking.

So that’s what Occupy Detroit did.

They helped the occupiers move a wood stove in, and fashioned a makeshift chimney. Then they replaced the boarded up windows with glass bottles, held in place with a mixture of mud and straw.

Then they repeated the process at six other abandoned homes on Golden Gate. Now there are some two dozen people occupying homes that were previously abandoned. Some of the abandoned homes are occupied by young people with the time and gumption to work on a fixer-upper. But others are members of Detroit’s homeless community.

Occupiers say the police don’t mind that they have essentially squatted in the vacant homes.

“They’re trying to solve murders and robberies,” said Eric Shelley, a local audio engineer with handy man skills who has helped teach the other occupiers how to swing a hammer and fix dry wall. “They don’t have time for this.”

The area is a hotbed for drug dealing and prostitution, and oftentimes abandoned homes become either crack houses or brothels.

To that end, Shelley said, “what we’re doing is beneficial to the neighborhood.”

“Our community service became our protest,” he said. “We’re doing what our government is supposed to be doing: providing a social safety net.”

The entire article is well worth reading, and Bob Plain is a wonderful photographer as well. There's a nice photo of the windows you saw in the video made with recycled glass bottles, they're really quite beautiful. You can finish reading here.

Copy Iceland, Not Italy

Iceland took one look at the extortion-by-austerity plan international banksters were demanding and told them to fuck off and die.

Italy just got the same ransom note but has chosen to surrender.

Guess which economy is dying and which is recovering.

Down with Tyranny:

(Last week) we talk about the option Europeans ensnared by banksters to go the Icelandic route. Rounding these banksters up and shooting the lot of them would be the most just thing to do. Iceland, however, decided to put them on trial instead.

Most of the E.U., bizarrely, is following conflicted and corrupted political elites who are urging surrender to the banksters instead. The bankster shill Germany installed as the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, is pushing a mindless, hardcore Austerity regime on his country, one demanded by Germany, the banksters and the international 1%-- and one that will drive the Italian people into destitution and suffering. I had to get John Amato to translate the video (just below) for me.

It's Elsa Fornero, Italy's Labor Minister, and as you can see, she's unable to complete her announcement and breaks down in tears. That's because on Sunday night Monti's government announced the Austerity agenda that, among other things, raises the age of retirement and freezes pensions against inflation, which the 1% will now use to drive the rest of us into penury. She started crying when she tried to say the word sacrifici (sacrifices). And, yes, that's Monti looking embarrassed next to her. There was some heckling as he spoke to Parliament.



Monti's (or Germany's) "Plan to Save Italy" calls for plenty of sacrifce -- and guess who's hide they're coming out of. Hint: not the elites who caused the worldwide financial collapse. In fact, the plan to raise income taxes of the wealthy somehow didn't make it into the announcement-- although Monti and his German patrons are demanding higher taxes on second homes, yachts, private jets and fancy cars-- taxes that the Italian elites have long figured out how to avoid entirely. The tax that will make a difference is an increasing VAT (sales tax)-- possibly to as high as 23%. That's about the most regressive tax there is and it falls squarely on the shoulders of the working poor and middle class. And Monti is foregoing a salary. That's supposed to make it sound fair and palatable. There were no announcements about growth (like stimulus projects), but Monti claims to stay tuned; he's got them up another sleeve for another day.

Over the past decade the standard of living for the average Italian worker has actually decreased. More than a million Italians have emigrated. But that was nothing compared to what's about to happen. Monti warned Italy that there are no alternatives, hoping none of them are aware of what Iceland did to solve a similar problem that came to its shores a little sooner. But the German, French (and British and American) banksters don't give a rat's ass about Iceland and can live with them escaping debt-slavery... as long as no one else tries it.

SNIP

Monti warned his critics, much the way you hear Republicans doing here (and you will hera much more of that in coming months) that if Italy doesn't adopt all these Austerity measures they're going to turn into Greece. "Without this package, we believe Italy would collapse, Italy would go into a situation like that of Greece, a country we admire but we don't want to imitate." He'll be going after labor unions next.

SNIP

Maybe working people need a new political party that represents the 99% and doesn't include corrupt politicians. They should do it fast, since Merkel and Sarkozy have some unification plans that will foreclose on political rights for Europeans.

From DWT's previous post on Iceland:

Smith urges the Eurozone to look to Iceland for their salvation-- Iceland, which didn't actually get rid of serfdom until 1894, long after Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Unwilling to let the banksters get away with it-- the way corrupt and conflicted politicians in the U.S. and Europe are doing-- Iceland opted for "sanity and growth... They renounced their unpayable debts and debt-serfdom, and let the market reprice their currency, debt and risk. The nightmare is past for them; they chose wisely."

No, there is no spending crisis - unless you call failing to spend enough to reduce unemployment a crisis. No, there is no deficit crisis - we've got no inflation and near-zero interest rates. No, we do not have to murder the middle class to please the banksters.

Let's follow the lead of Iceland, which after refusing austerity and charging banksters with fraud, now has one of the few healthy economies on the planet.

Credit Card Agreements That Don't Need a "For Dummies" Book to Understand

Government agencies - and private companies and nonprofits - benefit greatly from the leadership of dedicated, inspiring executives. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be less than it could have been had Senate repugs not refused to allow even debate about Richard Cordray, the person President Obama nominated to head the bureau.

But the absence of a director has not and will not kill the CFPB, which is moving fast to fulfill its mandate as conceived by consumer protection guru - and now Senate candidate - Elizabeth Warren.

From the White House:

Despite not having a director, the CFPB is doing everything they can to fight for consumers. In fact, this week, they kicked off a pilot program to simplify credit card agreements, and we wanted to make sure you saw it. Read their email below.

Millions of times every year, financial institutions issue a new credit card agreement to their customers. And every year, millions of consumers receive new agreements and do not read them.

We have an idea that we think can make things better: a simplified credit card agreement.

Check it out, and tell us what you think.

http://www.consumerfinance.gov/credit-cards/knowbeforeyouowe/

Credit cards are simple to use, but consumers have a lot of choice in exactly how they use them. Differences between cards provide even more choices to consumers.

Credit card agreements describe the terms and features of a particular card. They spell out the rights and obligations of both parties, and provide legal protections for the issuer.

This can result in a dense and complicated document that can be difficult for consumers to understand.

The thought-starter we’ve developed reduces this complexity. We’ve separated the key terms from the legalese, leaving a clear, readable document.

We think it makes sense to give consumers a short, understandable document with the key terms they need to know. And we think it makes sense to give issuers the option to use our definitions, freely available on our website. We think this could reduce the costs of compliance and printing.

But as credit card users and issuers, you’re the people who need these agreements to work for you, so we want to know what you think. Would consumers be more likely to read this? Could issuers use this approach for their own products?

Take a look at what we’ve come up with. Weigh in with your thoughts to help us make credit card agreements better.

http://www.consumerfinance.gov/credit-cards/knowbeforeyouowe/

Thank you,

Marla Blow
Acting Assistant Director, Card Markets
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Banks deliberately compose those insane, undreadable "agreements" to prevent anyone from understand what you are really getting into by accepting the bank's terms.

Banks know an understandable credit card agreement is going to cut deeply into their profits, and they will do their best to quash it.

Stop them. Read the new agreement, and tell Maria Blow how you think it can be improved. Thank her, too, for CFPB's work protecting you from the banksters.

There Used to Be A Word For This Kind of Thing

It is a testament to the bottomless greed and infinite arrogance of the banksters and other Wall Street criminals that they illegally foreclosed on the homes of active-duty military members. With utter shamelessness they did so during wartime, profiteering by turning military spouses and children out into the street.

Even more shamelessly, no one is prosecuting the banks for so much as a misdemeanor, when hanging is too good for them.

Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress last week:

For months, major banks have been dealing with the fallout of the “robo-signing” scandal, following reports that the banks were improperly foreclosing on homeowners and, in many instances, falsifying paperwork that they were submitting to courts. Banks have been forced to go back and reexamine foreclosures to ensure that homeowners did not lose their homes unlawfully.

In the latest episode of this mess, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has found that banks — including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup — may have improperly foreclosed on up to 5,000 active members of the military:

Ten leading US lenders may have unlawfully foreclosed on the mortgages of nearly 5,000 active-duty members of the US military in recent years, according to data released by a federal regulator. [...]

The data released by the OCC are based on estimates prepared by lenders and their consultants. BofA said it is reviewing 2,400 foreclosures involving active-duty military families to see if they were conducted properly. Wells Fargo is reviewing 870 foreclosures and Citigroup is looking at 700 cases.

Also under review are 575 foreclosures at OneWest, formerly known as IndyMac; 87 at HSBC; 80 at US Bancorp; 56 at Aurora, formerly known as Lehman Brothers Bank; 25 at MetLife; six at Sovereign; and three at EverBank.

Back in April, JPMorgan Chase, which was not one of the ten banks that the OCC examined, agreed to a $56 million settlement over allegations that it had overcharged members of the military on their mortgages. Chase Bank has even auctioned off the home of a military member the very day that he returned from Iraq. Two other mortgage servicers agreed in May to settle charges of improperly foreclosing on servicemembers.

Even without the banks illegally foreclosing, military members have been hard hit by the foreclosure crisis. Last year alone, 20,000 members of the military faced foreclosure, a 32 percent increase over 2008. The newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is tasked with ensuring that military members are treated fairly by financial services companies — a job that is obviously necessary — but Republicans in Congress have, so far, refused to confirm a director for the agency, leaving it unable to fulfill all of its responsibilities.

David Atkins "thereisnospoon" at Hullabaloo:

There's a great article in the Financial Times (last week) about illegal foreclosures on military families. Essentially, banks were foreclosing on families of active duty troops. That's against the law, and it carries criminal penalties. As in, jail time for those involved.

In the United States, that cannot be allowed to be happen to the "producers." Jail time is reserved for protesters and little people. Here's Dylan Ratigan:

Foreclosures on active duty troops is usually a big no-no, for a lot of reasons – for instance, when your credit rating is damaged by a foreclosure, it can impact your national security clearance. In addition, there’s enormous stress that the soldier goes through when his or her family is facing a threat of eviction, and it’s the kind of stress that makes him or her less equipped to be ready in a warzone. Congressman Bob Filner has even accused banks of “homicide” against American troops, blaming the banks for suicides resulting from the increased stress brought on by aggressive debt collection techniques.

So why is nothing happening?

Much has been made of President Obama’s argument that the banks did nothing illegally, and various other scholars and officials have argued that prosecuting the banks is far too expensive and difficult. Yet, the SCRA is a simple law with teeth; it carries real jail time, and the parties have already confessed to the crime.

SNIP

Interestingly, the Department of Justice seems to agree with this interpretation. Here’s a press release from the Department of Justice on a settlement of some of these claims, from Bank of America. I’ve bolded the important part.

The Justice Department announced today that, as part of its settlement with BAC Home Loans Servicing LP, a subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation, servicemembers whose homes were unlawfully foreclosed upon will each receive a minimum $116,785 plus compensation for any equity lost to compensate them for the bank’s alleged violation of the Servicemember Civil Relief Act (SCRA).

Note the use of the word “alleged.” Bank of America isn’t admitting anything, and the Eric Holder’s Department of Justice isn’t making them admit anything. Otherwise, the penalties might come into play. Sometimes, law can get very complex. But sometimes, it isn’t. JP Morgan admitted to violating the law. There are up to 5000 more cases, and each one carries up to a year in jail.

Eric Holder and various US Attorneys around the country aren’t prosecuting bank foreclosures on active duty troops, even though they know it is happening. Bank regulators know about the problem. Congress knows about the problem. Certainly, the Pentagon knows about the problem.

But once again, New York AG Eric Schneiderman is stepping up to the plate. Per Dave Dayen:

It looks like even Congress is getting involved, or at least a few of them, because systematic illegal foreclosures on everyday people can be ignored, but systematic foreclosures on members of the military cannot. Jack Reed, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, will request a hearing on the matter. Brad Miller, who has actually been great on this issue and who sees it as a lever to open up a host of inquiries on foreclosure fraud, had a great statement yesterday:

It is hard to see this as anything except a flagrant disregard for a law that has been on the books continuously since the First World War. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is very clear: if you’re in harm’s way in our nation’s military, you can devote your whole energy to our nation’s service without worrying what’s happening in a courthouse back home. And if you have a claim against someone in our military, you can wait until they get home and can defend themselves.

The SCRA is not some obscure legal technicality that might just have escaped the attention of mortgage servicers. Those servicers are all affiliates of the biggest banks, but they’re huge and specialized. Servicing mortgages is all they do, and they really don’t have that many laws to keep up with. They have got to have known what the law required, and consciously decided that they could just ignore it, the same way they apparently decided it was okay to file false affidavits in legal proceedings.

The continued failure to pursue criminal charges in the face of flagrant violations of the criminal law is destroying Americans’ faith in their government and democracy. In a democracy, no one is too big to prosecute.

Absolutely. And when Eric Holder won’t, Eric Schneiderman is at least willing to give it a try.

The only thing the U.S. government throws banksters in jail for these days is ripping off Goldman Sachs. Rip off Goldman Sachs, you spend a decade in jail.

But systematically violating the law by screwing over active duty troops? No problem.

Furious about this? Join Occupy Our Homes starting today.

From Salon:

Occupy Wall Street is promising a “big day of action” Dec. 6 that will focus on the foreclosure crisis and protest “fraudulent lending practices,” “corrupt securitization,” and illegal evictions by banks.

The day will mark the beginning of an Occupy Our Homes campaign that organizers hope will energize the movement as it moves indoors as well as bring the injustices of the economic crisis into sharp relief.

Many of the details aren’t yet public, but protesters in 20 cities are expected to take part in the day of action (today). We’ve already seen eviction defenses at foreclosed properties around the country as well as takeovers of vacant properties for homeless families. Occupy Our Homes organizer Abby Clark tells me protesters are planning to “mic-check” (i.e., disrupt) foreclosure auctions as well as launch some new home occupations.

“This is a shift from protesting Wall Street fraud to taking action on behalf of people who were harmed by it. It brings the movement into the neighborhoods and gives people a sense of what’s really at stake,” said Max Berger, one of the Occupy Our Homes organizers and a member of Occupy Wall Street’s movement-building working group.

The backdrop for all this is a new study suggesting the foreclosure crisis is only half over, with 4 million homes in some stage of foreclosure. Meanwhile, reports of illegal or questionable behavior by banks and mortgage lenders continue to stream in.

The Bicycle Generators Were the Last Straw

Bloomberg and his Wall Street henchmen were always going to destroy Occupy Wall Street, of course, and their excuses for doing so were limited only by how blatantly they could lie before their tongues flipped right off their rollers.

But I really think what pushed them over the edge was the bicycle generators. Right there in the middle of Manhattan, a block from Wall Street, directly in the faces of the fuckshite Masters of the Universe, Occupiers were living off the grid.

They had all the electricity they needed, and used it to power the very latest in high-tech communication tools - without paying a single penny to a utility company, an oil company or any energy company that holds a knife to the throat of civilization.

OWS beat the motherfuckers right in their own front yard and that could not stand.

I have no idea what's going to happen now. Maybe it will strengthen Occupy in New York and across the nation and the globe. Maybe it will propel Occupy to the next level.

Regardless, I trust Occupiers to make the right decisions. They've won every battle since they started on September 17, and I doubt Mayor FuckShite's little temper tantrum is going to stop them now.

Join your local Occupation today.

Bank of America: Stealing from the Unemployed

Just in time for Thanksgiving, too.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

It's never been more obvious that the unemployed have no one looking out for them. This is really a shocking story and if you still have a Bank of America account, this might finally motivate you to move your money:

CORDOVA, S.C.-- Shawana Busby does not seem like the sort of customer who would be at the center of a major bank's business plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds. She could visit a Bank of America ATM free of charge. But this small community in the state's rural center, her hometown, does not have a Bank of America branch. Neither do the surrounding towns where she drops off her kids at school and attends church.

She could drive north to Columbia, the state capital, and use a Bank of America ATM there. But that entails a 50-mile drive, cutting into her gas budget. So Busby visits the ATMs in her area and begrudgingly accepts the fees, which reach as high as five dollars per transaction. She estimates that she has paid at least $350 in fees to tap her unemployment benefits.

"It really boggles my mind," she said. "This bank is taking little bits of money out of thousands of pockets, including mine."

Bank of America recently aborted plans to charge ordinary banking customers $5 a month to use their debit cards in the face of national outrage. But the bank has quietly continued to mine another source of fees: jobless people who depend upon the bank's prepaid debit cards to tap their benefits. Bank of America and other financial firms -- including U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase -- have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits in 41 states. These contracts typically allow banks to collect unlimited fees from merchants and consumers.

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.

Move your money today. Find a credit union near you here.

Credit Unions to Goldman Sachs: Fuck You

Well of course they were more polite than that, but I'm sure Goldman heard it as an obscenity.

From Think Progress:

Goldman Sachs Withdraws From Credit Union Fundraiser After Learning Occupy Wall Street Was Being Honored Too

Earlier this month, the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City held a fundraiser to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It just so happened that this the credit union many of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) were using to store funds — and the protest group became an honoree at the dinner. When Goldman Sachs found out that OWS would be at the dinner, it pulled out of the event, along with its $5,000 donation. Despite the threat from the mega-bank to pull its money if OWS would be honored, event organizers decided to go ahead anyway. “Their money was welcome, but not at the price of giving up what we believe in,” said Pablo DeFilippi, associate director of member development at the National Federal of Community Development Credit Unions. “We lost their $5,000, but we have our principles.”

Have you fired your banker yet (and moved your money to a credit union)?

Banks Dumping Toxic Assets on Public

Used to be you had to be an unscrupulous hauler of hazardous chemical waste to be caught dumping poison on public property.

Now all you have to be is a giant unregulated bank with too much bad debt on the books.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

And this is why we've been screaming about regulating derivatives! I kind of think that the Occupy movement is going to have something to say about this corporate sleight of hand that came to light earlier this week. Do they really think we're going to look the other way and let them stick us with a $74 trillion bill -- just to let good old "too big to fail" Bank of America off the hook? I don't think so:

If you have any doubt that Bank of America is in trouble, this development should settle it. I’m late to this important story broken [...] by Bob Ivry of Bloomberg, but both Bill Black (who I interviewed just now) and I see this as a desperate (or at the very best, remarkably inept) move by Bank of America’s management.

The short form via Bloomberg:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation…

Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.

That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.

Now you would expect this move to be driven by adverse selection, that it, that BofA would move its WORST derivatives, that is, the ones that were riskiest or otherwise had high collateral posting requirements, to the sub. Bill Black confirmed that even though the details were sketchy, this is precisely what took place.

And remember, as we have indicated, there are some “derivatives” that should be eliminated, period. We’ve written repeatedly about credit default swaps, which have virtually no legitimate economic uses (no one was complaining about the illiquidity of corporate bonds prior to the introduction of CDS; this was not a perceived need among investors). They are an inherently defective product, since there is no way to margin adequately for “jump to default” risk and have the product be viable economically. CDS are systematically underpriced insurance, with insurers guaranteed to go bust periodically, as AIG and the monolines demonstrated.
The reason that commentators like Chris Whalen were relatively sanguine about Bank of America likely becoming insolvent as a result of eventual mortgage and other litigation losses is that it would be a holding company bankruptcy. The operating units, most importantly, the banks, would not be affected and could be spun out to a new entity or sold. Shareholders would be wiped out and holding company creditors (most important, bondholders) would take a hit by having their debt haircut and partly converted to equity.

This changes the picture completely. This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral.

But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough indeposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.

Don't be silly! This is just one of our precious zillionaire job-creators creating jobs.

"This is Why They Hate You and Want You to Die"

From Rumproast:

I was seriously tempted to drag “This is Why They Hate You and Want You to Die” by The Reformed Broker (A.K.A. Joshua M. Brown) over here in its entirety. But dude deserves mad page hits for this masterpiece, so here’s a few snippets:

You want to know why everyone in this country hates you and wants you dead, you big stupid fucking bank?

Here’s why, pay attention:

(Reuters) – Bank of America Corp will pay $11 million to ousted executives Joe Price and Sallie Krawcheck, a large payout at a time when banks face protests over pay but smaller than the eight-figure packages some executives received before the financial crisis.

[...]

Elevenmilliondollars? What the hell world are you inhabiting? Eleven million dollars for two departing executives because things didn’t work out?

[...]

The ordinary American is not a class warrior or a woe-is-me whiner coveting the rewards of others - the ordinary American simply believes that extraordinary rewards should go to those who do extraordinary things, not to paper-pushing failures at parasite banks.

Go. Read it all.

Yes, read it all and pass it on.

Hatred of the banks, the bankers, the finance industry, the hedge fund managers, all the Wall Street Masters of the Universe is not just justified and reasonable; it is proof of mental health.

Disrespecting Our Banking Overlords

It happens every time the downtrodden majority rise up against the minority plutocracy: out of terror and guilt, the plutocrats lash out with all the authoritarian violence at their disposal.

Ken Layne at Wonkette:

A lot of people have watched the shocking video of people being locked into the LaGuardia Place Citibank branch while some thug undercover cop wrestled away a nice young lady in a business suit who was apparently arriving at her bank to close her checking account in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Meaghan Linick of Brooklyn is the #OWS activist who recorded the whole awful encounter on her Blackberry, and then put it online where it has already been seen a million times. Here’s Linick’s firsthand account of what happened, which she was kind enough to send to Wonkette.

Read the whole shocking thing.

It's going to get worse before it gets better. But there will be inspiring moments like this.