By Shelley Erickson

The Pirate Pilfering!

Bankster piracy is so horrific even though the 50 US attorney generals agreed to let the banks off the hook with a pittance in refunds to homeowners, the fraudclosure money vampires sailed on assaulting and wrongfully seizing our properties.

It was business as usual set out to steal even more properties the exact same way and adding millions more homeowners to their fraudclosure list – yes, after the settlement the same old piracy tactics continued!

A lot of the “off shore” banking appears to be the result of the pirates and their pals hiding the money that they sucked out of the homeowners and investors like vampires. The wrongs (most of which were unfair and deceptive business practices, not to mention frauds) conducted against homeowners listed in the $25 billion dollar settlement continue to date.

Click here for Chris Hayes video: Foreclosure settlement: a nationwide crime scene

“Banks are foreclosing on military members, on people who had been approved for a loan modification, and even on people who were never behind in their payments–all part of an astounding settlement that shortchanged millions of homeowners and left hundreds of thousands wrongfully ejected from their homes.  Former Governor Elliot Spitzer; Alexis Goldstein, former Vice President at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, now an Occupy Wall Street activist; and Faith Bautista, who was the victim of wrongful home foreclosure in 2009, join Chris Hayes and paint a stark picture of what happened, who is responsible and why there isn’t more justice from the government.” Click here for Chris Hayes video

It appears nothing’s changed, the bank profits appear to be up (however, that changes from day to day – probably to add to the confusion) likely due to the shift of assets from one column of the ledger to another as they move people out of their homes and empty the properties… not to the loans the banksters receive that are backed by tax dollars. Thereby, another 100% plus profit gain.

The assault on homeowners is a lot like robbery on the high seas. The bankster buccaneers takeover your house with fabricated documents and leave you in the middle of the ocean to fend for yourself. This piracy is so lucrative that they have to bury their money overseas in treasure islands like the Cayman Islands.

How is it we are bailing these pirates out of jail time by giving them taxpayer money? Let’s see, we give them several TRILLION dollars and they settle up their frauds with $25 billion?? Really? The banksters wrote over 84 million defective loans – that’s about $297 to each homeowner – many of which didn’t even know they had a problem – and some still don’t!

The Money Laundering

And how did these banksters keep their cash flow levels up whilst they fleeced homeowners and raided pension funds? By washing money for the drug cartels and terrorist financing which was a “pervasively polluted” culture at HSBC and other banks that allowed the banks to act as financier to clients moving shadowy funds from the world’s most dangerous and secretive corners, including Mexico, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, according to a scathing U.S. Senate report issued last July (2012).

“Most international banks have a U.S. affiliate. They use it in part to compete for U.S. clients and business, but also to provide themselves with access to the U.S. financial system. Global banks want access to U.S. dollars, because they are accepted internationally, are the leading trade currency, and hold their value better than any other currency. They want access to U.S. wire transfer systems, because they move money across international lines quickly, securely, and to the farthest corners of the earth,” stated U.S. Senator Carl Levin [link to PDF] last July (2012) as part of the review of an investigative Senate Subcommittee report – U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History. The report [link to PDF] said large amounts of Mexican drug money likely passed through the bank.

“HSBC,” continues Senator Levin, “has been among the most active banks in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It first acquired a U.S. presence in the 1980s; today its leading U.S. affiliate is HSBC Bank USA, known as HBUS. HBUS has more than 470 branches across the United States and 4 million customers.

A major player in the money pirate network, HSBC and their affiliates applied pressure on their U.S. branch to ease up on U.S. anti-money laundering restrictions or look the other way when they spot suspicious activity. The end result is that HBUS becomes a treasure chest of risk for an entire network of bank affiliates and their clients around the world “playing fast and loose with U.S. banking rules,” as coined by Senator Levin.

HBUS is the key U.S. nexus for the entire HSBC worldwide network. In 2008, it processed 600,000 wire transfers per week; in 2009, two-thirds of the U.S. dollar payments HBUS processed came from HSBC affiliates in other countries. One HSBC executive told us that a major reason why HSBC opened its U.S. bank was to provide its overseas clients with a gateway into the U.S. financial system.”

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, is the oversight agency for the bank and took notice as the bank’s anti-money laundering controls began deteriorating. In September 2010, the OCC issued a Supervisory Letter, 31-pages long, describing a long list of severe anti-money laundering deficiencies, and followed in October 2010, with a Cease and Desist order requiring HBUS to again revamp its anti-money laundering program.

We’re talking about a staggering amount of money here under just one bank review.  Per Senator Levin: “The OCC cited, among other problems, a massive backlog of unreviewed alerts identifying potentially suspicious activity; a failure to monitor $60 trillion in wire transfers and account activity; a failure to examine risks at HSBC’s overseas affiliates before providing them correspondent banking services; and a failure, over a three-year period, to conduct anti-money laundering checks on more than $15 billion in bulk-cash transactions with those same affiliates.” Nice job if you can get away with it and it appears they did for many years. Apparently, our regulators were looking the other way too – until this investigation outed them.

The consequences of money laundering are the ones you would expect from operating a U.S. bank with inadequate safeguards – not to mention lack of decent oversight. The U.S. bank ends up “aiding and abetting transactions that fund terrorists, drug cartels, corrupt dictators, and tax cheats,” said Senator Levin. Yup. Bankster pirates at their best.

HSBC/HSUS provided money and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh believed to have helped fund al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, according to an Al-Jazeera story on the report.

The Breach!

Why not?! Are the banks actually paying any of the settlement fees? The banks duped investors and homeowners and got the opportunity to pay their way out of the crime. Deception upon deception by the bankster pirates and their fraudclosure crew members! These were not small crimes either.We’re talking about fraud, forgery, wrongful foreclosures, modification fraud – dual tracking, foreclosing on the military (criminal felony)…

How many average crooks do you know that get to buy their way out? Even petty crooks get at least a record and probation.

While bank pirates pretended to give the required relief to the homeowner, they gave themselves a trim with credit bids creating their own for principal reductions in non-judicial states but not passing it along to the homeowners. Homeowners who could have made payments if the inflated and fictitious values had been remedied never had a chance at keeping their home. What the homeowners received were deficiency judgments from foreclosures and short sales, added costs and fees, while tossing the homeowners and their families out into the streets instead of actually trying to keep folks in their homes.

Unlike any other product, where there is product liability, the defective mortgage loans could not be recalled and fixed.

LIBOR interest rates were rigged, appraisals were inflated, promises to refinance were broken because the banks no longer had the ability to attract investors or credit, and the overall contracts and paperwork were unquestionably in error – but what was the relief for the homeowner? A measly, pathetically small check.

The Money Vampire Deception!

It was all about dumping paper off their balance sheets just as they forced families into short sales with new buyers. By day, the banksters gave principal reductions to homeowners not in default which appeared to the general public to be good. However, this was a dark deception because the banks knew that the homeowner that received the principal reduction was not in default yet the bank got credit toward the settlement that was supposed to benefit the foreclosure victims. The banks also gained a new contract for the principal reduction with the homeowner enabling the bank to destroy the defective paperwork before there was an issue… and still no one knows who owns the notes.

Even the regulators that are supposed to be protecting the public are apparently protecting the banks by keeping secret the banks’ illegal activities and mistakes and where they blatantly violated the law.

And What Do Pirates Do With Their Treasures?

Why Is $21 TRILLION in the Cayman Islands When It Should Be in USA Stimulating the Economy?

By Neil Garfield

“The latest reports show that all the real money in the world issued by governments totals around $85 Trillion. AND the latest reports show that 1/4 of all the money in the world is in the hands of “Companies” (Straw-men) controlled by people in the United States. And the last statistic I find important, is that the shadow banking system has now grown to approximately $1.25 QUADRILLION dollars.

How did that money get to the Cayman Islands when it wasn’t there before the mortgage madness meltdown? If you don’t believe in magic or coincidence one can only conclude that the Cayman money, most of which came from our country, derives (i.e., is a derivative of) the false cash equivalents that was created by Wall Street. How did it get there?

Based upon my research, the money came from (a) skimming the investor money (around $17 trillion) before it ever reached the mortgage markets and (b) betting on losses under circumstances where  the Banks were in total control of the losses and the declaration of who could claim those losses.

And there are other more exotic ways in which at least $3 trillion was siphoned out of the U.S. economy. Altogether it looks like bankers are controlling more than $10 trillion that was “withdrawn” from the U.S. economy and are still on their way to doubling that figure as they foreclose on residential and commercial property in which the real loss w as suffered by real people whose future pension and retirement benefits are going to be cut because of a shortage of money.

So while we are arguing about national deficit and joblessness and hopelessness, the bankers have been vacuuming up all the money we have and maintaining their overpowering oligarchy…” Read more here.

Garfield continues:

“With all indicators pointing to the fact that bankers control our deficit, our debt and our spending, it is an inconvenient truth that the U.S. is going through a period in which government is by the banks, for the banks. Jefferson warned us of this and Hamilton successfully countered Jefferson with some very reasonable arguments.

The truth is, if you look back into American history and politics, there were two things that the framers of the constitutions missed completely. Banking is a necessary ingredient in every economy and thus is the support for any society. Investment banking increases liquidity by coming up with increasingly exotic ways to lower the cost of risk and thus lower the cost of credit.

BUT, what both Jefferson and Hamilton missed was the possibility that the quest for profit would turn out to be like one of those sci-fi movies in which our own creations — robots — take over the world and kill all the humans.

The answer is a middle ground — to treat banks for what they are, just like water, power and other utility companies that are essential for human existence. By putting them under restrictions that are reviewed for their effect on society, and indeed the world, the likelihood of another crash would be substantially reduced.

As it stands now, the likelihood of another crash and recession is at least as high as it was in 2007. Everyone is buying gold but nobody is talking about it. The fact is that with the next crash the use of American currency as the world’s currency will diminish to near zero.

And THAT means we will need to find something that pays back all that currency we have issued in a form acceptable to other nations.

The reason things are out of hand is the housing crisis and the failure of regulators and law enforcement officials to tackle the big problems the way the [U.S.] Senate is attempting to do in the break-up of the big banks. They see the risk. Whether they can act in time to prevent another drop into the abyss remains to be seen.

The entire TBTF doctrine is a cover-up for “let us keep the money we stole.” Take back the Cayman money and we have a thriving economy where workers are trained, deficits go down and the national debt tumbles. But that would mean allowing homeowners to reap rewards from Wall Street’s game — restoring their equity in homes that had been pumped in appraised value far beyond anything real. For reasons that defy imagination it seems to the policy of this country that it would be better to stay in recession, better to allow the bankers to escape jail. Better to leave with their trillions in the Cayman Islands, than to allow relief to the most essential segment of any economy — the middle class which is shrinking…” Read more here

Until then – the bankster pirates and vampires sail on… but beware of the silver crosses and silver bullets that the homeowners carry.

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