August 5, 2013

By: Kelly Diamond, Publisher

Evidently para-military cops aren’t the only ones breaking into the wrong houses these days.  Another entity of thugs has joined the ranks of our noble drug warriors.

They also break into the wrong homes, seize pets, and destroy property.  And just like their law enforcing counterparts, they pay nothing for the mistakes they make.

Imagine going on vacation, coming home, and finding out that your house has been ransacked and the locks to all your doors have been changed…

Imagine reporting this to the police, they investigate, and you find out a bank did this to you.  A bank foreclosed on your home, took all your worldly possessions and evicted you.

But you’re current on your mortgage!  Nay!  You don’t even HAVE a mortgage!

Oops!  Lowly bank clerk probably just typed a “1″ instead of a “2″ or  the GPS got it wrong.  Oh well.  So the bank should compensate you, right?

BAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Oh, dear sweet plebe.  You’re so cute when you trust in our system for justice…

You can read an actual keyboard on my forehead from where my face landed on my laptop.  I don’t trust government.  I don’t trust the banks.  I sure as hell don’t trust them together!  And by golly, this story is why!

Abby Martin of RT covered one case extensively in an episode of “Breaking the Set”.  For example, one victim, issued a list of about $18,000 worth of household goods for which to be compensated.  The bank said that since she neither had receipts for those things nor did her list match that of the bank agent who took the items, they would not reimburse her that amount.

Another victim sought the help of TWENTY-FIVE different attorneys to help him sue the bank that did this to him.  NONE of them would take the case.  He went it alone, and in a very rare hiccough of justice, the court ordered some sort of compensation.

In a class action suit involving approximately 4,000,000 victims of mistaken foreclosures and robberies, the government sued these huge multi-national banks (among them Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citi Group, and Bank of America).

***Side Bar: Didn’t we bail these guys out not that long ago?***

Look around your home.  How much do you have it insured for?  When I lived in a $300,000 home a few years back, we had it insured for $500,000.  That included every possible thing inside it as well as all the work done to the outside.  But take a quick inventory of your basic household appliances.  Perhaps a few expensive suits and shoes?  Heirlooms or jewelry?  Couple grand in tools and lawn equipment?  DVD collection?  Would a modest estimation of an average of about $50,000 make sense?  We aren’t including the house itself or your credit score which, by the way, are both about 3 leagues under oblivion after this little fiasco.

IF you think such an estimate is fair, then that would set our expectations at $200 Billion in a total settlement.  And considering neither the value of the house lost nor the destroyed credit standing are factored in, we can safely say the banks would collectively be getting off cheap at $200 Billion, right?

But they are banks… so let’s tabulate that into our calculated expectations… $100 Billion?  No.  $50 Billion?  No.  $25 Billion? Seriously, at this point we’re looking at an average of $6,250 per victim!  $10 Billion?????  $5 BILLION?????

Try $3.6 Billion dollars with the average pay out ranging between $300 and $800 to approximately 80% of the victims.  Unless of course you happen to be a member of the military.  In which case, you saw an average of $125,000 (Apparently, they are special… or “more specialer” than the others.)

You might be thinking about now, “THAT SUCKS!” along with a series of expletives and epithets.  I did.  I can’t believe my fingers are even steady enough to type this.  But it gets better!  (Because the only thing the government DOESN’T do half-assed is collude with banks.  They do that like a boss!)

“Part of the settlement is the agreement that banks admit no wrongdoing, no bank employees will be charged individually, and they don’t even have to fix the victims’ credit reports, which were wrongly devastated by each of the accidental foreclosures.”

No wrong doing?  Do banks just regularly pay out $3.2 billion dollars in a court sentencing for doing nothing wrong?  Despite some of the typographical errors committed by certain bank employees which lead to the wrongful foreclosures, none of them will be held to account either?  And banks can literally just take a big toxic dump on people’s credit who are actually responsible individuals and have done NOTHING to deserve a blemish, much less a side swiping of their credit?  Oh but look!  A taxable check in the amount of $300 should make it all better…

“Curiously, the FED and OCC ordered federal regulators to stop compiling the cost of damages to victims, so nobody really knows how much each homeowner lost financially or how many more victims there are who are being denied justice. Government officials confirmed earlier this year just before the settlement was announced that after two years of compiling lists of banking victims and the amounts stolen or lost, they were stopping because there were so many victims, the process would have gone on indefinitely.”

Wow.  Let’s just stop keeping track of this sort of thing.  It must be so uncomfortable to record all the losses, damages and victims.  I totally understand.  Put the pen down… Just round to the nearest and lowest possible number and just go with that.  Better still, just make something up and call it justice.

The Wall Street Journal likewise looked into this matter from the “how do you plan to make things right and prevent this from happening in the future” angle.  They came up rather short when they sought answers to such a question.  All they found were more victims, more stories, and more tragedy.

“In a separate report, the Wall Street Journal reported only weeks before the government halted its collection of victims that independent bank audits showed there were many more wrongful foreclosure victims than the FED and OCC’s lawsuit was arguing. And even though the perpetrators admitted there were more victims and larger financial losses, in effect offering to pay more money to more victims, the FED and OCC refused to accept the information and instead did the opposite by halting the inclusion of any more victims or damages to the suit.”

There’s the cherry on top of the shit sundae right there.  LA LA LA LA LA!!!!  I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER MY OWN DENIAL!!!!!  STOP WITH THIS INCESSANT DISCLOSURE OF TRUTH!

I’ve more or less become desensitized to the reports of police raids gone wrong.  Policemen breaking down doors, killing innocent children and elderly people, shooting dogs on sight, setting off tear gas bombs… And while for the most part, these cops see little or no real disciplinary action, the city or county typically reimburses the property damage done to the private home that was wrongfully invaded.

But when a bank can seize everything from ANYONE with NO recourse for the private citizen to whom this was done?!  Strictly speaking, a bank cannot physically repossess a home that is not empty and vacant.  Which is why they wait for people to go on vacation, and then proceed to relieve their homes of moveable property first.

I’d like to think there is some way to protect your assets from such egregious miscarriages of justice such as these, but I honestly don’t know if there is!  The thing is, the basis for which these homes were seized was not because of who owned them or any public record. They were simply the WRONG house.  A house across the way or down the street was the intended target of these seizures.  These were mistakes made by typographical errors and GPS navigation devices.  I would HIGHLY recommend a consultation with Bobby or Paul to see if any of these scenarios could’ve been mitigated by some sort of restructuring plan.

Evidently, not only is our system litigious but it apparently has no further interest in justice.  I’m gonna go bang my head against a wall to ease some of the pain from researching this piece……