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A Favorite American Con Revisited

Howell Hurst Uncategorized

FROM MY CORNER

How easily deceived the American people are always astounds me. Although I believe they have the capability, when provided enough real facts, to make sound decisions, their ability to be taken in by fast talkers, financial and political, remains firmly intact.

Because of corporate legal schemes and the fact that most information people acquire comes from media owned by wealthy people, whose wealth depends on keeping them as ignorant as possible, poorer Americans keep themselves dependent on those hostile to their cause.

Their rich adversaries would not be so inordinately wealthy if they actually intended to provide valuable services and products to such citizens. But that is all too often not reality. Instead, they, by design, proactively keep masses of people on the edge of poverty through planned forethought – specifically to profit themselves

Telling this truth to the American people is not how to earn either respect or money in America. Indeed, it engenders animosity from both the rich and the poor. One learns after time to keep such knowledge under one’s hat.

Today, however, I just heard on NPR radio a detailed program of how the mortgage backed security scam remains alive and well in America. It is an appropriate issue to write about because, if you will remember, mortgage backed securities caused our most recent Great Recession.

It is a real estate scam tangentially supported by some of the major financial firms of America, such as Chase Manhattan for example. Its design creates investment packages sold to speculators. These complex home-buying mortgages, feebly backing the investments, contain clauses permitting lenders to add various fees and fines to poor people’s existing mortgages, and to easily foreclose on them for minor infractions.

For instance: One scheme is simply for a loan company to include an obscure clause allowing them to foreclose and take back a home from a buyer for missing a single payment. This one includes a big bag of fees that earn mortgage companies a total of several billion dollars annually for keeping buyers’ allegedly refundable deposits, tossing them out on the street, and reselling their property to others.

It’s all legal, of course, safeguarded through the work of thousands of real estate attorneys paid high fess to create them for the mortgage loan companies. The NPR station highlighted one such real estate mogul today who is one of Donald Trump’s closest friends.

I’ll not mention his name because he is worth billions, is just finishing building his own 77,000 square foot home in Los Angeles, and could beat the sox off me in court. if he wished to sue me for alleging he does such a thing to earn a living. I don’t have the money to hire the kind of lawyers I would need to document in court the details of his particularly profitable scam.

My reason for exposing this continuing type scam is to alert you that the same old financial schemes that kept Wall Street financing firms and their mortgage companions earning big dollars have not been halted following their last famously initiated world wide recession.

It is still business as usual. And the President of the United States, it would appear, has deep pocket political allies in the business. It is, by the way, commonly reported knowledge that Trump made much of his fortune designing various gigantic real-estate deals that were sold to other immensely wealthy people. His too were often built on shortchanging less wealthy people and small businesses.

Returning to my first paragraph, the logical connection for addressing this issue is simplicity itself: to propose that the deceived Americans I mention are not only the uneducated poor, but remaining middle class Americans who buy the packaged investments and passively support the practice by saying and doing nothing to prevent it recurring.

We are now embroiled in the Russia/Trump political scandal that dominates the news, and we are all thrilled and excited to be an observing part of it. Righteously, we are all betting that our side will win and be judicially vindicated.

The joke is that whoever wins or loses the current political investigations will not deter the Wall Street Financiers, the mortgage scammers, their lawyers, and their high-placed political cronies from winning financially. They’re all in this for the long haul.

The political and financial corporate corruption we are facing may be based on ostensibly legal attorney antics that could be proved illegal in courts of law. But those of us who would need to force such action continue passively to ignore, or at best silently observe, them as they continue. Many invest in them despite their illicit designs.

As I said at the beginning, we are the deceived. And by allowing such shenanigans to continue we are endangering our own financial existence. The dereliction of duty is ours. When the people of a country remain obliviously immune to such obvious corruption, they may expect (again and again!) to become its next victims.

Oh! Have you or your institutional retirement fund bought such investment packaged mortgage scams? Are you ready for the next American recession? They tend to come every seven to ten years. The last great one was in 2008, if you recall. Do the math. It doesn’t require Calculus.

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