Amnesty for the Banksters, Debtor's Prison for the serfs, Club Fed for Kosher Nostra by piratenews

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Amnesty for the Banksters, Debtor's Prison for the serfs, Club Fed for Kosher Nostra

POSTED BY: PIRATENEWS
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 06:06
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Monday, June 14, 2010 7:40 PM

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!

Sheriff's deputy presents Vicki Valentine with a "writ of possession" that supposedly entitles a private investor to confiscate her home. That jew investor acquired the alleged right to foreclose on Valentine's home by purchasing a "tax lien" involving an unpaid $362 municipal water bill. Now that kosher nostra investor is going to prison, but Vickie will never get her home back.

Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in Baltimore, attorney and real estate mogul Harvey M. Nusbaum had a long and lucrative career in officially sanctioned crime as an IRS agent.

In 2002, Nusbaum grew weary of robbing people on behalf of the state. Rather than repenting in sackcloth and ashes, as any decent person would, he hired out as a privateer -- a freelance buyer and collector of tax debts.

This form of retail fascism -- a public-private partnership in plunder -- was immensely profitable for Nusbaum. Had he exercised even the slightest restraint on his corrupt appetite, Nusbaum most likely wouldn't be headed for prison.

Maryland is one of 29 states that permit city governments to raise money by selling tax debts to investors. Each year, Baltimore's municipal government bundles up tax liens against properties whose owners haven't paid local taxes or utility bills (such as water and sewage fees) and sells them at auction.

In the most recent auction, Baltimore sold liens on 12,689 properties -- ranging from rotting shells of long-abandoned homes to office buildings in the downtown business district. Purchasers assume responsibility for collecting the debts, and the opportunity to foreclose on properties whose owners can't pay them off.

According to a study conducted by the Baltimore Sun, twenty percent of those liens involved amounts smaller than $1,000. Financial necromancers employed by collection agencies can transmute a trivial amount -- a delinquent utility bill or an unpaid and long-forgotten municipal citation -- into a budget-crippling debt of several thousand dollars.

"You will pay," one of Nusbaum's minions told a victim who called to complain after a tiny unpaid water bill had metastasized into a $4,000 extortion demand. "Everybody does."

Nusbaum and his cronies filed over 6,000 lawsuits, raking in an estimated $11.5 million in legal fees, title search fees, and interest. This inevitably attracted the attention of the "Justice" Department's antitrust division, which discovered that Nusbaum, his partner Jack W. Stollof, and other as-yet unnamed investors engaged in collusive bidding in a dozen tax auctions conducted in Baltimore and five other Maryland jurisdictions.

According to federal prosecutors, the actions of Nusbaum and his colleagues were a criminal conspiracy to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Once in possession of the liens, the conspirators "used the court system to threaten homeowners with seizure of their properties unless they paid legal fees, interest, and other charges ... [that] often totaled 10 times the original debt," observed the Sun.

The real crime here, according to the Feds, was not the use of government-aided extortion to wring hugely inflated sums from struggling, debt-plagued citizens, but rather the use of collusion to enhance the cabal's profits at the expense of local governments. You see, the entire point of the tax auction racket, in the Sun's eminently suitable phrase, is "feeding the public treasury."

During a rigged auction in 2006, Nusbaum and his comrades bought a bundle of liens containing Vicki Valentine's unpaid $362 municipal water bill.

Valentine had inherited a home in West Baltimore from her father, who died, after a long struggle with Alzheimer's, in 2003. The house was free and clear, but many of the utility bills had been left unpaid.

Struggling with chronic depression after taking care of her dying father, Vicki was soon dealing with unemployment as well. In 2006, Vicki he paid $100 on an outstanding water bill of $462.28. By year's end, that figure shot up to more than $700, after the city added interest, processing charges, and property taxes.

Under severe financial strain, Vicki filed several legal challenges, which delighted the firm that had purchased the lien, since this permitted them to tack on additional legal costs. On September 19, 2008, a judge ordered Vicki to pay $3,603.41, or lose a home that was already bought and paid for. She didn't have the money. So last February, the local sheriff's department seized Vicki's home on behalf of Montego Bay Properties, the entity that held the lien following at least two post-auction transfers of ownership.

In a desperate letter written a year before her house was seized, Vicki pleaded with Baltimore City Circuit Court to extend the payment period.

"For now, this is the roof over my son's and my head," she observed, pointing out that she was unemployed and frantically looking for work. "I am trying to get the money together to catch up on my delinquent bills. Please allow more time to pay all bills connected with the foreclosure...."

Vicki didn't understand that in the corporate socialist system that now exists, mercy is a gift conferred only on the powerful and politically connected. This is illustrated by the fact that the presiding officers of DRT Fund, which was listed as a co-conspirator in Nusbaum's bid-rigging scheme, were granted amnesty -- that is, official forgiveness -- in exchange for admitting that they had done wrong and facile promises to pay restitution "to any person or entity injured as a result of the bid-rigging activity ... in which [the investment firm] was a participant."

Here's the curious thing about that promise of "restitution": The only party "injured" by the bid-rigging scheme, according to the Feds, was the Municipal Government of Baltimore.

...

Deadbeat kosher nostra Rosenberg clubbing with Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons and porn scar Kim "My Daddy Saved OJ" Kardashian

A cynic once said that while a petty thief will find himself behind bars or dangling from the end of a rope, the most powerful criminals are those who run the jails and operate the gallows. The corporatist plutocracy controlling our country is determined to make a prophet of that anonymous cynic.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2010/06/amnesty-for-banksters-deb
tors-prison.html

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010 6:06 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Shit, I'm surprised anyone noticed - this crap has been going on a long, long time in Baltimore, one reason I got out of the repo business, lucrative (albeit on occasion, dangerous) that it happened to be, was because the line between repo and outright theft is a damn thin one when you have finance companies who deliberately "lose" payments in order to have the excuse to yoink back a car which is worth more than what's owed on it (mortgage companies are going balls out bonkers with that kind of trickery on homes now, too - so if you're on the payment upside, WATCH LIKE A HAWK) and so really you have little way of knowing whether or not the repo is valid or justified...

This is one reason I am such a complete asshole to tow company drivers and chase them off the property after hours, with prejudice and without mercy - which is kinda funny cause the one guy who got into it with me about that, and rubbed me the wrong way so bad I blacklisted him and his truck despite that being the towing company we use to remove junked vehicles... well, come to find out he was a sex offender who's wife used to run a daycare center, and they let him out again, and sure enough, bout two weeks after I tore a strip off him, they locked him up for the same crime, no doubt to let him out again.. *hisss*
But still, there was *something* about him that was pushin all my buttons, useful to know there was actual cause to it.

Anyhows, most repo and debt collectors are total creeps, anyone involved in that kinda biz for any length of time quickly realizes exactly how thin the line between debt collection, extortion, and theft is, AND how bloody often these cretins cross with, usually without penalty, so if they remain in the biz past that point, you really have to question their basic humanity.

-Frem

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