Category Archives: Resources

GA meeting notes for 2015-05-15

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Occupy Delaware
General Assembly
Meeting Notes
Hanover Church
Wilmington, Delaware
2013-05-15
Chock-full of links it’s a wonderful notes.
Better notes a millionaire’s money can’t buy!

Meeting start: 1920 hr

REPORTS BACK

Pacem in Terris authorized fiscal agency for the Delaware Hour Exchange, which will be launching soon, and I hope all ODE people will get involved. Time banking is an international movement in which each person’s time is worth the same as any other’s. [delawarehourexchange.org] DHE is a project of Wilmington in Transition, and has members now from all around the northern Delaware area. It’s about helping each other meet needs, valuing community, not devaluing non-scarce talents and skills, such as nurturing, helping, in community. Unlike the cash economy. DHE will have a roll-out very soon. We’ll post the announcement on the ODE events page, and send out emails. The night before last 7 of the 8 worker bees of the DHE went to Phoenixville, PA for their time bank’s [http://www.pa-timebank.com/] annual meeting and the launch of a new Mid-Atlantic Time Bank Alliance. Act locally, share globally, like InterOccupy cf. Occupy. The IRS says it’s not taxable. The founder, Edgar Cahn [http://www.law.udc.edu/?ECahn], was one of the panelists. The local community-building aspect is a primary reason it’s sponsored by Wilmington In Transition [https://sites.google.com/site/wilmingtondeintransition/]. The book, No More Throw-Away People. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_banking and http://nomorethrowawaypeople.org/] Social services have been shown, the recipients, when asked to reciprocate, their usage of the service decreases and their self-esteem goes up. I’ve got some feelers out with HARP, Homeless Are People Too [https://www.facebook.com/harp2011], all hours are valued equally. WiT has reached the milestone of establishing Working Committees! DHE is the Economy working group.

Kris Lynn got a message from Havre de Grace, who are interested in starting an Occupation! Asked if we’d come down to hold a GA. So people who are interested contact Kris. Mark will contact Kris. We’ll have to take Steve and Jen, our institutional knowledge base.

Jen has moved forward on her media project. Delaware Matters (stolen from Bernie, who’s thrilled). So next step is to start a non-profit online newspaper for Delaware. So we’ll have a meeting of people who are interested. Contact Jen. [Delawarematters.org]

Jen registered OccupyDelaware.org domain name. So now we have Occupyde.org and that one.

Save The Valley [http://savethevalley.org/] rally was last night. Beaver Valley is Woodlawn Trustee-owned land just across the Delaware line, they were looking to get a zoning change to develop it. At the zoning hearing last night there were 1000 people to protest the zoning change. The developers withdrew their zoning applications. But are planning to re-submit separately in the future. Vigilance!

We did Delaware Ave. bridge sign hold-up. “Reinstate Glass-Steagall Now!” and a policeman stopped to ask if that’s the financial thing…! So the message is getting out there!

[insert photo here!]

There are a group of state senators in Delaware co-sponsoring a resolution to encourage the federal government to re-instate Glass-Steagall: Venables, ???. Please contact Cathy Cloutier [http://www.cathycloutier.com/] and encourage her to sign on to this. Ted Kaufman on his Website consistently promotes re-instatement. [http://tedkaufman.com/ted_kaufman_on/whos-for-too-big-to-fail-now] The News Journal has endorsed Glass-Steagall, as has the president of M&T Bank, and many other honest banks. [http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/02/dodd-frank-a-total-failure-bipartisan-panel-agrees/] Part 2 of Dodd-Frank enables banks to convert depositors’ money into stocks and then to declare those stocks worthless, just like what happened in Cyprus and Greece! We’re moving forward with outreach and education. To get people to pressure elected officials, relate it to the personal level. The collapse can happen again! The collapse is happening again, right now. The EU is imposing conditions on nations to pay debt, banks are telling nations what to do. This is fascism, really. Synarchism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synarchism], which is how Nazi Germany was funded. It put Franco, Mussolini, Hitler into power. Paul Hoffman’s [Ben Protess?? http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/compromise-seen-on-derivatives-rule/] editorial, yesterday, was very clear.

OWS has a subgroup, Occupy The Economy. Their group calls are next to useless, now. OWS is losing track of what it started out to do. Where are they now? Occupy Sandy? But there are fundamental issues that need attention. [http://alternativebanking.nycga.net/ and https://docs.google.com/document/d/12xYu0yUaHE2RCKgCHfWV7CLK-_Ekljhp_A8kDVM86Y4/edit]

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The March Against Monsanto on May 25th – Philly, West Chester, D.C. – it’s an international day of action. [http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/] Many other things going on the same day, not deemed to have a critical mass among known likely local participants, to organize something locally – probably some will attend D.C. or Philly rallies.

Same day is a protest at noon, at Horsham (PA) Air Guard base. [http://dronefreehorsham.com/] It is the newest installation of military UAV (‘done’ aircraft) operations. Pacem in Terris (and others) will be there protesting the use of military drone aircraft assassinating people abroad. Pacem will take it’s scale model ‘predator drone’.

Also… put the word out to promote the continuation and expansion of the Delaware Ave. vigil/protest. Street theater – how do we make these actions [even] more fun?

Jen is continuing editing on the film shot back last Autumn about predatory lending – it’s slow work, but moving along.

Meeting adjourned: 2045 hr

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Watch Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream

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“Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) presents his take on the gap between rich and poor Americans in Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream. Gibney contends that America’s richest citizens have “rigged the game in their favor,” and created unprecedented inequality in the United States.

Nowhere, Gibney asserts, is this more evident than on Park Avenue in New York. 740 Park in Manhattan is currently home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the country. Across the river, less than five miles away, Park Avenue runs through the South Bronx, home to the poorest congressional district in the United States.

In Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, Gibney states that while income disparity has always existed in the U.S., it has accelerated sharply over the last 40 years. As of 2010, the 400 richest Americans controlled more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the populace — 150 million people. In the film, Gibney explains why he believes upward mobility is increasingly out of reach for the poor.”

Watch Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

What ever happend to the RICO suits against MERS?

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MERS: It was developed on Wall Street by a lot of folks in that industry, and each time you have a mortgage, by law in almost every state, the person that sells that mortgage or transfers it, in other words the bank, is supposed to pay a recording fee to your local county clerk so they can keep the title clean and record it. They set this system up so they wouldn’t have to pay these fees, and we believe that eventually they have benefited to the tune of billions of dollars as a result of that, by not paying county clerks across the United States.

Way back in 2010,

Class Action RICO Suit Against MERS Alleges Tens of Thousands of New York Foreclosure Frauds Orchestrated by “Foreclosure Mill” Attorney Steven Baum & Banks

Just who owns the loans Steven Baum forcloses on is a deliberate mystery and potentially tens of thousands of New York homeowners lost their homes on a mystery.

 

Louisiana sues 17 banks under RICO laws for MERS scheme

by in Mortgage, News –  

The triple damages claim under civil (sigh) RICO is a billion dollars or so for Louisiana alone — real money — which makes Welborninteresting. Even more interesting is that RICO, as a “theory of the case,” is simple, clean, and easy to explain, unlike so many of our criminal banksters’ crooked schemes.

Why does The New York Times give front page treatment to a $25 million bribery scandal run out of Bentonville, Arkansas, and no coverage whatever to the filing of a $1 billion dollar lawsuit over an accounting control fraud scheme run largely out of Manhattan? (“Your search – Baton Rouge RICO site:www.nytimes.com – did not match any news results”; 2:20AM, April 25, 2012.) A question that answers itself, once asked.

Kentucky Brings RICO Action Against MERS, GMAC et al

Oct. 5, 2010

$7.5 B Lawsuit Filed Against MERS

Published August 8, 2010 | By Jeanne

 

et cetera, et cetera

Yet there is progress.

But it all goes back to MERS. It doesn’t so much track mortgage transfers as much as it pretends to track them. And the interested parties pretend that they have a handle on that transfer. This makes it easier to charge additional fees on a borrower, who has no idea who actually owns his or her loan. The entire thing is DELIBERATELY opaque. The less the borrower knows, the more they can get fleeced.

The registry actually served to hide the true owner of a mortgage, making it difficult for borrowers to get help in working out their loans.

The facts in Mr. Kline’s case seem to indicate another flaw with the MERS registry — that it may not even track mortgages effectively.

MERS is the electronic smokescreen that allowed banks to build their securitization Ponzi scheme without worrying about details like ownership and chain of title. According to property law attorney Neil Garfield, properties were sold to multiple investors or conveyed to empty trusts, subprime securities were endorsed as triple A, and banks earned up to 40 times what they could earn on a paying loan, using credit default swaps in which they bet the loan would go into default. As the dust settles from collapse of the scheme, homeowners are left with underwater mortgages with no legitimate owners to negotiate with. The solution now being considered is for municipalities to simply take ownership of the mortgages through eminent domain. This would allow them to clear title and start fresh, along with some other lucrative dividends.

The bottom line- based on Washington state law, MERS is not a legal beneficiary unless it actually held the promissory note secured by the deed of trust when foreclosure was initiated- which in Bain’s case, it did not.

“Obviously the court said no, MERS cannot be that entity, because it is not the note holder and it never is the note holder,” explained Huelsman.

Huelsman says the implications are huge- with the potential to affect hundreds, perhaps thousands of foreclosures initiated by MERS in this state in the past 10 years. The ruling could open the door for legal action by homeowners who’ve been foreclosed by “MERS,”  instead of an actual loan holder who’s name is on the promissory note.  It also has the potential to affect foreclosures currently being challenged because of MERS.

MERS IS DEAD. LONG LIVE MERS

MERS remains vulnerable to a single judicial opinion affecting MERS’s arguments (and, therefore, lenders’ and servicers’ foreclosure processes) throughout any given state. However, the Essay concludes that the fact that these opinions were deemed newsworthy at all indicates that MERS’s role in mortgage foreclosure litigation is unlikely to be halted or significantly hindered on a national scale.

MersLittle Beau Peep

http://stopforeclosurefraud.com/

POK v. MORTGAGE ELECTRONIC REGISTRATION SYSTEMS, INC. | Superior Court of RI – MERS loses Motion to Dismiss in Quiet Title action

Posted on30 August 2012.

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

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In case you haven’t yet had a chance to read Matt Taibbi’s article on Bank of America in the March issue of Rolling Stone, we are posting a link to it HERE.

Matt’s articles are always a great read and anything about how corrupt Bank of America is  right up our alley here at Occupy Delaware.

Some highlights from the article, include:

Matt describing Bank of America as the

“…world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents…”

Also, likening collateralized mortgage obligations to cheap oregano being sold as marijuana….

“In essence, America’s financial institutions grew vast fields of cheap oregano, and then went around the world marketing their product as high-grade weed.”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314#ixzz1soxyCsFl

You can also watch Matt Taibbi at OWS in February, talking about Bank of America and the mortgage crisis.