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Fire Walk With Me

Fire Walk With Me's Journal
Fire Walk With Me's Journal
August 15, 2013

This Secret Video of Detained Solidarity Sing Along Participants Will Warm Your Heart

Stop The Wars ?@sickjew

This Secret Video of Detained Solidarity Sing Along Participants Will Warm Your Heart

http://occupyriverwest.com/us/basement-singalong … #wiunion

August 15, 2013

Disabled Desert Storm Veteran evicted at gunpoint

This past Friday (August 9, 2013) at 8am, Mark Harris was met by DeKalb County Marshals with guns drawn for a surprise eviction.

Mark had been in good faith negotiations with Fannie Mae, even going so far as to take a trip to Washington DC to meet with top Fannie Mae officials. Instead of working with Mark to find a solution that would keep him in his home, Fannie Mae hired a private enforcement team to join DeKalb Marshals and Avondale Estates police.

Fannie Mae enforcers stood in front of Mark's home, at times pretending to be police, attempting to impede traffic, asking neighbors to prove they lived in the community by showing identification and directing Avondale Estates police on how to enforce Mark's eviction.

Friday afternoon, Occupy Our Homes Atlanta and Mark Harris refused to leave Mark's property, setting up tents in the yard determined to keep Mark in his home. On Saturday, Mark and four others went to jail in an act of civil disobedience.

Right now, Mark, a disabled Desert Storm veteran, is homeless and Fannie Mae has enforcers surrounding Mark's home 24/7 at an estimated cost of 15,000 dollars a month.

Can you help us send a message to Fannie Mae that this is unacceptable? We are asking folks to do three things:

1. Share this video:



(Preview) chronicling Mark's eviction and resistance on all of your social networks.


2. Call Fannie Mae CEO Timothy Mayopoulos at 202-752-7000 and let him know their treatment of Mark Harris at 1164 Dunwick Dr., Avondale Estates, GA is unacceptable. Tell him to rescind the foreclosure and let Mark back in his home now!

3. Send a postcard to Fannie Mae's Southeastern Regional Director Candy Lasher asking her to let Mark Harris back in his home. We have prepared postcards and we are willing to send one for you --- all we need is your address! You can send one yourself to: Candy Lasher, 2041 Breckenridge Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA 30345.

In Solidarity,

Occupy Our Homes Atlanta


--
Denechia "Neesha" Powell
Occupy Our Homes Atlanta
Program Organizer
August 15, 2013

Navigating the Security Culture - Activism in a Post 911 World

Ng2Kzoo ?@Ng2Kzoo

Navigating the Security Culture - Activism in a Post 911 World
#OpGetSmart



#Occupy #NatGat2
August 14, 2013

The ‘Wild West’ of groundwater: Billion-dollar Nestlé extracting B.C.’s drinking water for free

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Wild+West+groundwater+Billion+dollar+company+extracting+drinking/8785227/story.html

Because of B.C.’s lack of groundwater regulation, Nestlé Waters Canada — a division of the multi-billion-dollar Switzerland-based Nestlé Group, the world’s largest food company — is not required to measure, report, or pay a penny for the millions of litres of water it draws from Hope and then sells across Western Canada.

snip

“No permit, no reporting, no tracking, no nothing,” said David Slade, co-owner of Drillwell Enterprises, a Vancouver Island well-drilling company. “So you could drill a well on your property, and drill it right next to your neighbour’s well, and you could pump that well at 100 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and waste all the water, pour it on the ground if you wanted to … As far as depleting the resource, or abusing the resource, there is no regulation. So it is the Wild, Wild West.”

snip

If you walk into Cooper’s Foods in downtown Hope — less than 5 km away from Nestlé’s bottling plant — and buy a 1.5 litre bottle of Nestlé Pure Life water, it will set you back $1.19.

That’s $1.19 more than Nestle paid to the government last year for withdrawing more than 265 million litres of fresh water from the well.

(Via Idle No More Official on Facebook.)


For a great deal more reading, including video of Nestle's 2005 CEO clearly stating that water is not a human right, it should be taken and sold for profit:

Water privatization by the richest rich is happening now ("hydraulic empire&quot incl. the Bush family
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023406830
August 14, 2013

The ‘Wild West’ of groundwater: Billion-dollar Nestlé extracting B.C.’s drinking water for free

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Wild+West+groundwater+Billion+dollar+company+extracting+drinking/8785227/story.html

Because of B.C.’s lack of groundwater regulation, Nestlé Waters Canada — a division of the multi-billion-dollar Switzerland-based Nestlé Group, the world’s largest food company — is not required to measure, report, or pay a penny for the millions of litres of water it draws from Hope and then sells across Western Canada.

snip

“No permit, no reporting, no tracking, no nothing,” said David Slade, co-owner of Drillwell Enterprises, a Vancouver Island well-drilling company. “So you could drill a well on your property, and drill it right next to your neighbour’s well, and you could pump that well at 100 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and waste all the water, pour it on the ground if you wanted to … As far as depleting the resource, or abusing the resource, there is no regulation. So it is the Wild, Wild West.”

snip

If you walk into Cooper’s Foods in downtown Hope — less than 5 km away from Nestlé’s bottling plant — and buy a 1.5 litre bottle of Nestlé Pure Life water, it will set you back $1.19.

That’s $1.19 more than Nestle paid to the government last year for withdrawing more than 265 million litres of fresh water from the well.

(Via Idle No More Official on Facebook.)


For a great deal more reading, including video of Nestle's 2005 CEO clearly stating that water is not a human right, it should be taken and sold for profit:

Water privatization by the richest rich is happening now ("hydraulic empire&quot incl. the Bush family

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023406830
August 14, 2013

Your mortgage documents are fake!

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/12/your_mortgage_documents_are_fake/

Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin spelled this out in testimony before Congress in 2010: “If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever.”

The lawsuit alleges that these notes, as well as the mortgage assignments, were “never delivered to the mortgage-backed securities trusts,” and that the trustees lied to the SEC and investors about this. As a result, the trusts could not establish ownership of the loan when they went to foreclose, forcing the production of a stream of false documents, signed by “robo-signers,” employees using a bevy of corporate titles for companies that never employed them, to sign documents about which they had little or no knowledge.

Many documents were forged (the suit provides evidence of the signature of one robo-signer, Linda Green, written eight different ways), some were signed by “officers” of companies that went bankrupt years earlier, and dozens of assignments listed as the owner of the loan “Bogus Assignee for Intervening Assignments,” clearly a template that was never changed. One defendant in the case, Lender Processing Services, created masses of false documents on behalf of the banks, often using fake corporate officer titles and forged signatures. This was all done to establish standing to foreclose in courts, which the banks otherwise could not.

Szymoniak stated in her lawsuit that, “Defendants used fraudulent mortgage assignments to conceal that over 1400 MBS trusts, each with mortgages valued at over $1 billion, are missing critical documents,” meaning that at least $1.4 trillion in mortgage-backed securities are, in fact, non-mortgage-backed securities. Because of the strict laws governing of these kinds of securitizations, there’s no way to make the assignments after the fact. Activists have a name for this: “securitization FAIL.”

(More at the link. Via Occupy Fights Foreclosures. Cross-posted from Occupy Underground.)


Further reading:

Just in the last 12 months, Wall Street’s Blackstone Group has raised $8 billlion to buy up homes on Main Street. Following suit, according to The New Republic, JP Morgan Chase—the nation’s largest bank—has organized a fund to purchase 5,000 single-family homes in states with some of the most depressed real estate prices. As I wrote last year, a former Morgan Stanley housing strategist left that bank, organized a billion dollars, and is purchasing up to 10,000 homes with these new resources.

It’s Not a Housing Boom. It’s a Land Grab
http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/05/the_dangerous_new_housing_boom.html


The main asset of the bottom 80% of US income earners is their home. (Third "Plutonomy" memo, "The Plutonomy Symposium: Rising Tides Lifting Yachts&quot
http://our99angrypercent.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/download-citigroup-plutonomy-memos/
August 14, 2013

Your mortgage documents are fake!

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/12/your_mortgage_documents_are_fake/

Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin spelled this out in testimony before Congress in 2010: “If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever.”

The lawsuit alleges that these notes, as well as the mortgage assignments, were “never delivered to the mortgage-backed securities trusts,” and that the trustees lied to the SEC and investors about this. As a result, the trusts could not establish ownership of the loan when they went to foreclose, forcing the production of a stream of false documents, signed by “robo-signers,” employees using a bevy of corporate titles for companies that never employed them, to sign documents about which they had little or no knowledge.

Many documents were forged (the suit provides evidence of the signature of one robo-signer, Linda Green, written eight different ways), some were signed by “officers” of companies that went bankrupt years earlier, and dozens of assignments listed as the owner of the loan “Bogus Assignee for Intervening Assignments,” clearly a template that was never changed. One defendant in the case, Lender Processing Services, created masses of false documents on behalf of the banks, often using fake corporate officer titles and forged signatures. This was all done to establish standing to foreclose in courts, which the banks otherwise could not.

Szymoniak stated in her lawsuit that, “Defendants used fraudulent mortgage assignments to conceal that over 1400 MBS trusts, each with mortgages valued at over $1 billion, are missing critical documents,” meaning that at least $1.4 trillion in mortgage-backed securities are, in fact, non-mortgage-backed securities. Because of the strict laws governing of these kinds of securitizations, there’s no way to make the assignments after the fact. Activists have a name for this: “securitization FAIL.”

(More at the link. Via Occupy Fights Foreclosures.)
August 14, 2013

Don’t Wait for the Revolution — 'Be the Change' and Live It

http://www.alternet.org/visions/dont-wait-revolution-be-change-and-live-it

We can’t create a better world if we haven’t yet imagined it. How much better then, if we are able to touch such a world, experience it directly, even live in it—if only to a partial degree and for a brief moment. This is the idea behind “prefigurative interventions,” actions that not only work to stop the next dumb thing the bad guys are up to, but also enact in the here and now the world we actually want to live in.

These kinds of interventions come in all shapes and sizes, from modest artistic gestures like John and Yoko’s 1969 “WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)” Times Square billboard, to utopian-flavored mass movements like Occupy Wall Street with its free libraries, communitarian ethic, and experiments in direct democracy.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller advised. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” A brilliant insight, but he’s only half right, because the best direct actions—and social movements—actually do both.

Consider the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s. They were not only brave acts of resistance against the racism of the Jim Crow South, but they also beautifully and dramatically prefigured the world the civil rights movement was trying to bring into being: blacks and whites sitting together as equals in public spaces. The young students didn’t ask anyone’s permission; they didn’t wait for society to evolve or for bad laws to change. In the best spirit of direct action, they walked in there and simply changed the world. At least for a few moments, in one place, they were living in an integrated South. They painted a picture of how the world could be, and the vicious response from white bystanders and police only proved how important it was to make it so.

(Cross-posted courtesy of xchrom)

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Current location: Los Angeles
Member since: Sat Apr 9, 2005, 09:20 PM
Number of posts: 38,893

About Fire Walk With Me

"There is something terribly wrong with this country." -V So, OCCUPY.
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