What Would You Do If A Bank Stole Everything You Owned?

With millions of Americans across the country facing default and foreclosure banks are hiring outside firms to take possession of their homes. It is often the case that those living in homes that have been repossessed by their lender stay until the very last minute, or simply aren’t aware of their final eviction date. In such cases these firms simply enter the home, take all of the personal belongings of the tenants, and restrict access. Usually, the tenant has no recourse and may never have their personal items returned to them. It’s a common practice that happens every day in modern day America.
Something else that has become commonplace amid the real estate crisis of the last several years are errors associated with foreclosure repossessions. Sometimes the bank is at fault, while other times the firms hired by them repossess the wrong house.

Katie Barnett of McArthur came home a few weeks ago to find everything in the house gone. She eventually discovered that First National bank mistakenly foreclosed the wrong house — but kept her stuff. Not only did they clear everything out like the Grinch, but they changed the locks. Their actual foreclosure target had been the house across the street.
This matters not to the bank president who responded to her $18,000 estimate for wrongfully stolen goods with a firm:
We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is.
But they make no attempt for remedy and the actual translation is: Oops, nothing we can do now. (Without the Oops)
Barnett says:
I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back.
Now, I’m just angry… It wouldn’t be a big deal if they would step up and say ‘I’m sorry, we will replace your stuff.’ Instead, I’m getting attitude from them. They’re sarcastic when they talk to me. They make it sound like I’m trying to rip the bank off. All I want is my stuff back.

Additionally, the police chief closed the case!
Katie remains without any of her things and no compensation for theft and damages.
Via: Activist Post
(emphasis added)

In any other situation this would be a crime punishable by prison time and the perpetrators would be charged with breaking and entering, burglary, and theft.
But, since it’s a bank, the police chief closed the case and chalked it off as an honest mistake.
An individual who was doing nothing wrong lost everything she owned. And what does the bank do? They laugh at her and make snarky comments, and they refuse to make her whole again.
What would you do if everything you owned was stolen and the criminals who committed the act were left free to prey on others?
Maybe you could hire an attorney with the money you probably don’t have.
Or, you could take matters into your own hands and visit the bank to forcibly take back the money owed to you, but you’d be facing 25 to life as a result.
Corporations, especially banks, continue to act with impunity, whether it be stealing billions of dollars from investors or breaking into their homes and looting everything in sight.
How long before Americans hit a breaking point?
How long before those who are being taken advantage of get mad as hell and decide they’re not going to take this any more?
The day of reckoning will come and when it does the bankers and brokers who have made a living off the backs of hard working Americans better hope they used some of their stolen loot to build underground bunkers, because the masses will be looking for payback, and they won’t be carrying picket signs.
They’ll be carrying pitchforks, nooses, and AR-15?s.

A Message to Trayvon Martin Protestors

(Romany Malco)   I haven’t touched on the Trayvon Martin issue because race matters in this country are the paralysis of the American people. To constructively discuss Trayvon would require empathy, introspection and an understanding of America’s social and economic history. This is why the open forums we have seen thus far seem to fuel more ignorance and bias than reasonable debate.
To be brutally honest, the only reason people are even aware of Trayvon Martin is because it became a topic within mainstream news and pop culture. Meaning: News directors saw it as a profitable, sensational story. Hundreds of blacks die annually in South Side Chicago without even a blurb. Trayvon isn’t in the mainstream news for any reason other than ratings and profit. The news coverage on the Zimmerman case almost implies that the killing of this young black man is somehow an anomaly and I resent that.
In this country, if it isn’t streamlined through mainstream media and pop culture, it doesn’t seem to warrant national debate. Our “government” continues to wreak havoc on our civil liberties and there is little to no protest from the black community because of media diversion tactics that keep such pertinent issues out of mainstream media. But if Jay-Z or Rihanna were to make mention of it, we’d suddenly be jolted out of our sugar comas and protesting on freeways.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Mr. Apocalypse beats with his Walking Stick around the Burning Bushes.

Dog Poet Transmitting........

May your noses always be cold and wet.

When we consider how much we do not know... and then we find out a few things, we have to consider just how wide is the sea of our continuing ignorance. I ask that you pay careful attention to this. One of the ways that evil destroys itself, is that it is subjected to the same tactics it seeks to visit upon us. It is divided against itself. Few of the servants of evil trust each other and they are more than willingly to engage in all kinds of crimes against each other. Also, evil is far more easily compromised than good. The only reason a lot of us are looking at Croque Monsieur is because life is a club sandwich and you get 3 levels, although all of them may not be functionally operative at the same time.

What do you do when you are an internationally famous vampire and mass murderer, on your way to the pizza ovens of Hades? You get on a road show epidemic of photo-ops and... it doesn't hurt to let the world know how many government, skinhead Nazis it takes to protect you either. Yeah, when you're going down the big skid-mark highway, having been Big Kahuna at the CIA and instrumental in the killing of the most popular president ever (JFK) as well as the father of the least popular president ever; the head of the Carlyle war machine and a three term president of the United States , of which he only got elected to once, becoming president by proxy in a kinda-sorta, evil twisted way, just like numba won sun did ...through voter fraud...'”aw, lawd, lawd, I can't stop thinking about her, out dere in that cold graveyard, night after night, ngghhh! Ngghh! Ngghhh”!

There has been no more evil a clan in American history than that of the Bush Family Manson, maybe the Rockefellers were, maybe there was some other band of syphilitic sociopaths that I'm overlooking or don't know about . Seems like every single member of that Morlock brood of Bushes, had some kind of a hand in 9/11. I guess there's all kinds of trees planted in IsraHell for this family of righteous gentiles so... you got the Bushes who are the poster children for what a righteous gentile is all about. This is the kind of thing the Bushes brought to the country of America. In the words of the old mass murderer himself; “"If the American people ever find out what we have done, they will chase us down the streets and lynch us”. Here's another example of what Bush and his banker buddies did to America.

This is what America gets now in the form of leadership and he was far and away the front runner, until his serial, sexual psychopathy, reared its ugly mushroom head one more time.; course, it's New York City, where it doesn't matter what you do, where the weak are killed and eaten, it only matters who you are and who you know. Yes, weennie waggers and craven, degenerate bankers is what you get in the age of materialism. Tyranny is what you get, in capitalist nations, that are founded on the ideas of individual liberty and justice for all. What you get is a Draconian police state, where both government and law enforcement, operate for the welfare of the rich ♫I'm rich! Sonofabitch, I'm rich♫”where justice is only for the rich and it ain't justice.

What kind of a country is it, where a bank can break into your home and steal the contents and throw them away or sell them and it turns out to be the wrong house and they don't have to replace what they stole? What this calls for is the vigilante justice that didn't happen in The Grapes of Wrath. Nothing says, I am an asshole and proud of it like this does. These are the people who say, “He who dies with the most toys wins”.

What's America's favorite sandwich, really? This is America's favorite sandwich. You know, round here, it's not a posting, not an authentic jennuwine, visible bas relief of a posting, without some mention of Mr. Apocalypse. When it started out, Mr. Apocalypse was standing against the wall, near the table with the punch bowl and toxic, GMO, fake cheese filled, treats ...with a boutonniere affixed to his jacket pocket. “Blue Velvet” by Bobby Vinton was playing on the high school gym sound system, to be followed shortly by Ray Charles with “Ramblin Rose”. Those as had the stones to ask someone, or who were dancing with the ones who brung them, were cheek to cheek, during these poignant, nostalgic moments. This was before there was two guys cheek to cheek, or a couple of Sumo wrestler chicks, with miniature (not all that miniature) cinder block, nose ring piercings, hanging down as a sort of ornamental testimony to “been there and done that”.

Anyway, Mr. Apocalypse started out leaning against the wall, like the rest of the wallflowers. Then something a little faster came on and he started moving around a little and things started happening. There was just a tad more truth in the air and that led to a degree more intimacy, in the changes among the people in the gym. This wasn't all positive because neither the truth nor intimacy is always positive. Then Chuck Berry came on, probably “Maybelene”, ironically, ♫why can't you be true♫ and the atmosphere definitely changed, as invisible forces moved through the room, out the door too and up into the jetstream, where it began to proliferate all over the place. Then, I don't know, maybe something by Duane Allman or Lynyrd Skynyrd came on. It could have even been The Boss. It definitely wasn't Tom Waits and- what I'm saying- is that the mood kept intensifying, Truth keeps increasing and subsequently things kept changing to adapt to the truth and every day there was more and more of this kind of thing. Mr Apocalypse is on his way to becoming a cross between Michael Jackson and James Brown. It is inevitable and that is something else one really ought to keep in mind.

Once again, cause it gets missed, I've got nothing against most anything cheek to cheek and I have danced like a mad, intoxicated fool with drag queens and drag racers, who managed to get out of their rides for a moment. They might not have been dancing. It might have been simple tension happening, from some hours at 200 miles a hour. My point being, with all of the Minority 'pre-crime' Report, future hate crime legislation coming, I got to use humor to militate against all of that happening. The Devil cannot abide ridicule. “Laugh at the devil and he will flee from you”. This is an important point that people can look right at, nod their head and then go on about their business as usual. The truth hides in plain sight. It vibrates between the lines of inspired text. It is as near to you as you are near to it and as far away as you are far from it.

When death comes, as death invariably does ('some kind of death' (or change) comes to us all), death will scan you for the truth that is in you and then, like one of those automated, parking garage machines, it will spit out a ticket to somewhere. This world is a bus station waiting room, where some are doing more than waiting, for better or worse. Otherwise, they are waiting, which is also called, “going through the motions”. This is something that occurs at a certain point, after childhood and early adulthood have passed and then that window of opportunity closes, wherein one is given the chance to make the connection necessary, to live a life that is not composed of 'going through the motions”. This is a rare occurrence, as you can see, by taking only a superficial look around you and... we live in a world, where looking superficially around, is pretty much 90% of any looking around that takes place.

Paying more than superficial attention, makes you aware of things like this. Of course, being aware of things like that, makes you responsible for acting a certain way and living a certain way, as a result of being aware and that's why a lot of people choose the roads of denial and stupidity, to help ease the pain of going through the motions. That's where they go through the motions, down at the corner of Denial and Stupidity. There's quite a crowd there. It's nothing but elbows and assholes and glazed eyes, highlighting the fixed and frozen grins that acts as a stiff-arm, going down the sidelines to who knows where. All that matters is getting there, not where 'where' is. That might change a person's whole game plan, knowing where 'where' is and what 'where' means. Not knowing means never having to say you're sorry, until it's too late and you're already there, where 'where' is. Where is a lot like nowhere, sometimes it's a lot like Purgatory and sometimes ...it is only a barren and empty field with no one to keep you company but Saturn.

It's a bit of a dichotomy how there can be so many people stranded in their own loneliness, millions of them. It's like a dense crowd of people, who somehow manage to be all alone. Maybe it's like those ranks after ranks of cubicles, that stretch on till the view bends out of site, since space is curved; a kind of barbershop window display of the front and back of your head, going on and on and on. There's probably some kind of meaning, wrapped in a riddle there.

It's all coming down and it's all coming out and they are racing to get 'where' and they will get 'where' but it won't be what they think. No matter how fast they go, it will not be fast enough. No matter what they do, it will not be enough. That will dawn upon them with an ever greater degree of intensity and that is how it should be. That is how it should be.


End Transmission.......

John Oliver: Monopoly Game Removed ‘Go to Jail’ Option to Reflect America’s Financial System

Hasbro’s classic board game Monopoly has  eliminated its jail space,  freeing up time for young players more interested in what the company is calling “snack toys.” Interestingly, Monopoly’s doing away with “jail” can also be interpreted as a statement on the state of the American economy. As John Oliver hilariously pointed out last night on the Daily Show, “The game designed to teach children how capitalism works has removed the ‘go to jail option’ to reflect the financial system they’re going to grow up in, presumably replacing it with a ‘get bailed out by congress and then go directly to the cayman islands option.’”

Nowadays, banks like HSBC can get away with massive money laundering for Mexican drug cartels, pay a fine, and sleep in their own beds that night, while kids caught with a joint can face the more punitive punishment of incarceration.
Oliver also used the Monopoly segment to touch on the Goldman Sachs aluminum price-rigging scandal.
“Goldman can bet on the future price of aluminum while simultaneously having the ability to goose the future price of aluminum if that’s something they’d find interesting or profitable,” he said, “In the stock market, that’s what known as insider trading. In the commodities market, that’s known as simply Thursday — or Monday or Tuesday or Friday or Wednesday.”

Oliver wrapped the long segment up with this pensive remark: “Now that you think about it, the new version of Monopoly is actually perfect, you just move pieces of metal around and around in a circle collecting money whenever you want and it’s guaranteed that nobody’s going to jail.”
Watch it in two parts, below:

Kristen Gwynne is an associate editor and drug policy reporter at AlterNet.  Follow her on Twitter: @KristenGwynne

Republished from: AlterNet

Down The Rabbit Hole w/ Popeye (04-08-2013) A Warning About Tyranny From Those Who Lived Through It

(FEDERALJACK)   On this edition of DTRH Popeye starts off by playing two warnings from people who have lived through real tyranny. The first audio clip is of Kitty Werthmann, a survivor of Hitler’s Nazi regime and Stalin’s Communist regime. What she witnessed has striking parallels to what is going on today. The second clip is of Manuel Martinez, who survived the overthrow of Cuba by Castro and the communists, and he tells of tortures and murder of thousands of unarmed, defenseless Cubans at the hands of the communist regime. At the end of the show he opens the phone lines and gets the listeners take on our slide into fascism.

YOU CAN ALSO LISTEN ON YOUTUBE

An overview of the early subversion of America

Shortly after the Constitutional Convention, when it was up to the states to ratify or reject the newly proposed United States Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were already warning the American people that, once approved and established, a consolidated federal government's "relentless expansion of arbitrary power was unstoppable, its tendency toward corruption was inevitable, and its appetite for despotism was unquenchable," according to Joseph J. Ellis in his book American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (pg. 116). Looking back in hindsight, the Anti-Federalists had it exactly right, at least in the case of the United States.

Anti-Federalists, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and others skeptical of a centralized federal government were also raising alarm bells at the prospect of a centralized Bank of the United States shortly after the Constitution was approved and ratified by the states. Alexander Hamilton and the elite banking and financial establishment in America, working on behalf of and in collusion with international financial interests centered around the Jewish banking families in London and other major European capitals, "represented a tiny minority within the overall populace" who "had somehow managed to engineer a hostile takeover of the fledgling American republic and were now poised to consolidate their control to the detriment of all the ordinary citizens, mostly farmers, the true lifeblood of the nation," writes Ellis (pg. 170).

President Andrew Jackson, amongst others, would later warn the American people of the dangers that monopolistic, speculative financial interests posed to the young United States in the early 1800s. In his 1832 veto of the legislation that would have rechartered the Bank of the United States, President Jackson wrote:

The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes... Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought to make themselves richer by act of Congress.

President Jackson declared to his cabinet "The Bank of the United States is itself a Government," and warned the American people private corporations sought "power to control the Government and change its character." He also courageously told his Vice President Martin Van Buren, "The bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!" And indeed, President Jackson did just that. However, the international money power seeking to subvert the United States was not defeated.

Time and time again, righteous men in American history raised the alarm bells and sought to prevent the subversion and destruction of the nation their ancestors founded. However, the insatiable desire for political and financial control over these United States was unstoppable, and the forces of international speculative financial capitalism came to dominate this country over the course of the 19th century. The destruction of American economic (and political) sovereignty was finally complete with the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, which centralized the banking and financial apparatus of this nation into the hands of a clique of international plutocrats hell bent on world domination and subjugation. The centralization of a nation's banking system is a key component of international communism, whose primary goal is the overthrow of Western civilization and all it stands for.

The very concept of a corporation has been transformed and perverted over time. In early American history, states granted private corporations a monopoly on fulfilling a particular public service for a specific period of time. If a road needed to be expanded, for example, and the state was lacking in funds to complete the project, a private corporation would write a charter explaining its purpose (expanding, managing, and maintaining the road expansion) and the state would grant the corporation the privledge of providing an essential public service. Corporations helped build canals, bridges, roads, and other major infrastructure projects, including the extensive railroad system which provided transportation and communication advancements to the American people and private businesses.

But even in this regard, corruption set in, monopolies formed, and the people became oppressed by large financial interests dominating and influencing the state and federal government. Expressing a popular grievance in early America, the editor of New York's Evening Post William Leggett, wrote:

We cannot pass the bounds of the city without paying tribute to monopoly. Not a road can be opened, not a bridge can be built, not a canal can be dug, but a charter for exclusive privileges must be granted for the purpose... The bargaining and trucking away charted corporation privileges is the whole business of our lawmakers.

The rise of speculative financial capital and large corporations, especially railroad corporations, ushered in an era of unprecedented greed, speculation, corruption, and insider dealings in early American history. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher and writer who wrote extensively about the unique political and cultural traditions of America, perhaps best expressed the plight of the struggling American frontiersman and farmer. Writing in Democracy in America, Volume Two, de Tocqueville contrasted the "territorial aristocracy" or the traditional elite in European society and the "manufacturing aristocracy" or the financial elite which had arisen in America:

The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their distresses. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our day first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public.

Congressman Hendrick B. Wright of Pennsylvania, a champion of the working class and of the American pioneer, advanced legislation in the late 1870s to help homesteaders - small independent American farmers and ranchers - secure and develop their land without going into massive debt. Congressman Wright's efforts were defeated by plutocratic financial interests and their minions, who denied the small independent pioneer and farmer - the very men and women who made this country - any sort of financial concessions while they themselves were lavishly awarded government contracts and land grants. Congressman Wright, who once said, "The working men of this land are better entitled to the bounty of Government than aggregated wealth," responded to the rejection of his legislation with this poignant remark:

Congress can grant railroads money and land, but if it talks of relieving the poor and oppressed, the cry comes, 'We cannot reward idleness.'

I wonder what Congressman Wright would have said about the criminal bailout of Wall Street in late 2008? Congress can grant Wall Street speculators bailouts as a result of their criminal financial practices, but if it talks of relieving home-owners and oppressed debt-slaves, the cry comes, "We cannot reward idleness."  Has anything really changed in American politics in the past 150 years?

Indeed, government largess and corrupt dealings created corporate bonanzas, especially for railroad corporations, which was the standard operating procedure in America for much of 19th century and even to this day. Railroad, lumber, cattle, and mining interests were essentially handed large land grants and other special privileges and insider-deals by the federal government, while independent American farmers and homesteaders were largely exploited and forced to fend for themselves. After being elected to his first presidential term in 1884, President Grover Cleveland appointed William Andrew Jackson Sparks as land commissioner. Mr. Sparks' first report to Congress summarized the situation Americans knew all too well:

The widespread belief of the people in this country that the Land Department has been very largely conducted to the advantage of speculation and monopoly, rather than in the public interest I have found supported by developments in every branch of the service.

As former Governor of Pennsylvania Gifford Pinchot explained, "It must be remembered that monopolistic control was infinitely more potent in the West, in those days, than in the East. The big fellow had control of the little fellow to an infinitely greater extent west of the Father of Waters than east of it." Speculators, monopolists, and plutocrats were taking over America, and those that stood in their way did not stand a chance.

Henry Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Jr. prophetically wrote in the late 1800s:

The belief is common in America that the day is at hand when corporations far greater than the Erie - swaying power such as has never in the world's history been trusted in the hands of mere private citizens, controlled by single men like Vanderbilt, or by cominations of men like Fisk and Gould... after having created a system of quite but irresistible corruption - will ultimately succeed in directing government itself.

Congressman James B. Weaver, the populist presidential candidate for first the Greenback Party in 1880, then the People's Party in 1892, described the ails of the American political system which still plague us today when he wrote in 1892, "Public sentiment is not observed. The wealthy and powerful gain a ready hearing, but the plodding, suffering, unorganized complaining multitude are spurned and derided."

The 19th century truly was a pivotal period of time in American history.  It was during this century that the government formed by the Founding Fathers morphed from an instrument which served the American people to one which served private economic interests to the detriment of the average American worker, farmer, craftsman, and independent businessman.

Writing in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler succinctly explained exactly where America went wrong during the 19th century:

... as economic interests begin to predominate over the racial and cultural instincts in a people or a State, these economic interests unloose the causes that lead to the subjugation and oppression [of those people or State].

Perhaps unknowingly, Adolf Hitler perfectly described the United States of America during the 19th century - and it's only gotten worse. 

Stringing The Pearls: Chinese firm to build $1.4 bln Sri Lankan Port City

Source: Daily Mirror
Sri Lanka has signed a deal with a Chinese company to build a $1.4 billion city complex on reclaimed land near the harbour of the capital Colombo, an official said Wednesday.
The state-run Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) will reclaim 230 hectares (568 acres) next to the new Colombo South port, said SLPA chairman Priyath Bandu Wickrama.
He said the SLPA finalised a deal under which China Communications Construction Company Limited (CCCC) will invest $1.43 billion to build a “Port City” that will change the coastline in the capital.
“We are moving towards the sea to reclaim land and build a mini city,” Wickrama said during a visit to the port.
“We have finalised the deal with CCCC and construction will begin by September. We hope to complete the land reclamation within 39 months,” he added, without saying when the deal was struck.
He said the SLPA planned a new 22-floor headquarters, hotels, apartments and recreational activities on the reclaimed land. The CCCC will be given 50 hectares (123 acres) of the land on a 99-year lease.
Several international hotels, including Hong Kong-based Shangri La are building hotels in Sri Lanka to cash in on the island’s post-war growth after troops crushed Tamil rebels and ended 37 years of ethnic war in May 2009.
Chinese companies have emerged as key infrastructure partners and have already built air and sea ports, highways and railroads in the Indian Ocean island, which is strategically located along East-West trade routes.
The first phase of a $500 million container port next to the main Colombo harbour is due to open next month and bring Sri Lanka on a par with port facilities in Singapore and Dubai, Wickrama said.
China Harbour Engineering will have control over the new Colombo South Harbour for 35 years and it will compete with the existing state-run facilities as well as privately-owned container terminals within the large Colombo port.
Wickrama discounted fears that China was throwing a “string of pearls” or a geographical circle of influence, around the regional superpower India. He said Sri Lankan ports would not be allowed to engage in any military activity. (AFP)